Michael attempted to protest, but she went on talking:
"I know what you are going to tell me; but it won't do any good. All that you might say I have said to myself again and again, to convince myself that my belief is absurd. And what would that prove? All that we are not acquainted with is absurd, and we know so little! No; my remorse can never be overcome. No matter what you may say will not keep me from spending my sleepless nights puzzling things out, and thinking of certain dates in my recent life. When I began to be interested in you, my son was still alive, and I forgot him. When we were walking through the gardens of San Martino, he was perhaps suffering the agonies of hunger, and martyrdom, and I like the heroine in a novel, like a crazy schoolgirl, was kissing you, and making you promises! Besides, the arrival of the telegram the same afternoon that you were going to come, seemed like something definitive in my life! Don't you see the intervention of a superior power, the punishment for my badness?"
The Prince tried to speak again, but in vain.
"That is why I am avoiding you; that is why I have not replied to your letters. You are not to blame; but you mean remorse to me, and your presence recalls my crime. Besides, I know myself; I am only a poor, weak woman, the very personification of thoughtlessness, and neglect. If I were to accept you as a comrade in grief, since I am not indifferent to you, perhaps I might give in to what you want. And that would be horrible, still more horrible even than what has gone before; one of those offenses which people maddened by passion commit against natural laws. Don't try to see me; I don't want to see you. If I had been a true mother, thinking only of him ... who knows!... Perhaps he would still be alive. But some one was bent on punishing me for my unnatural conduct, and that some one killed him, so that I might awaken, at the very moment when in my shameful love, I felt myself happiest."
Michael no longer cared to say anything. He looked at this woman with pity and dismay in his eyes. He recalled the Princess Lubimoff with her extravagant beliefs in the mysterious; and of Alicia's own mother, with her religious manias. Whatever he might try to say would be useless. That absurd and sorrowing conviction of hers had opened a gap between them like a gulf that could be bridged over only by time.
The silence of the Prince caused her to lose the nervous exaltation that had made her express herself with such fervor.
"Leave me now," she murmured gently. "What could I do for you? I am only a woman now; I am an old woman, centuries old, as old as sorrow itself. You need a sweetheart, and I am simply a bad mother, a mother tormented with remorse."
Her renunciation of the past, and the feeling that she was only a despairing mother caused her voice to break with a groan, and at the same time her eyes filled with tears. With a timid hand Michael drew away the handkerchief that she had raised to her face to hide her weeping. He murmured incoherent phrases, with the intention of consoling her; but immediately he was mastered once more by anger.
"If you really were alone," he said in bitter tones, "I could wait, and perhaps time would silence the after scruples that torment you. But your loneliness is a lie. A man enters your house at all hours as though it were his own, while I must go away, so that, as you say, you may recover your tranquillity."
With a feminine instinct, Alicia had hastened to raise the handkerchief to her face again, on feeling herself free from Michael's hand. She felt she must be ugly with her watery eyes, her pale lips, and her nose red with weeping. But the words of the Prince gave her such a shock of surprise, such a desire to refute the offensive supposition, that she took the wrinkled batiste from her face.