‘I should be glad to become stoical. This stranger’s visit cannot make any difference to me. It will not make my father love me any better, or feel more kindly disposed towards Cyril. It may make him a little worse perhaps. It may stir up old bitterness.’ ‘Why?’ cried Bella, eagerly, her bright blue eyes becoming unbeauteously round in her excitement. ‘Don’t talk to me about him any more, please, Bella. I do not know who he is, or what he is, or whence or why he comes. He will go as he came, no doubt, leaving no trace of his presence behind him.’ But here Beatrix was wrong. This was not to be. In the library the two men were standing face to face--men who had not met for more than ten years, who had parted in anger too deep for words. Christian Harefield contemplated his visitor calmly, or with that stony quietude which is passion’s best assumption of calm. ‘Has the end of the world come,’ he asked, ‘that you come to me?’ ‘You are surprised that I should come?’ responded the Italian, in very good English. ‘I am surprised at two things--your folly and your audacity.’ ‘I shall not praise my own wisdom. I have done a foolish thing, perhaps, in coming to England on purpose to do you a service. But I deny the audacity. There is no act in my past life that should forbid my entrance to this house.’ ‘We will not re-open old wounds,’ answered Christian Harefield. ‘You are a villain; you acted like a villain. You are a coward; you acted like a coward in flying from the man you had wronged, when he pursued you in his just and righteous wrath.’ ‘My career of the last ten years best answers your charge of cowardice,’ replied the other. ‘My name will be remembered in Italy with the five days of Milan. I never fled from you; I never knew that you pursued me.’ ‘I spent half a year of my life in hunting you. I would have given the remnant of an unprofitable life then to have met you face to face in your lawless country, as we are meeting to-night in this room. But now the chance comes too late. I have outlived even the thirst for revenge.’ ‘Again I tell you that I never wronged you, unless it was a wrong against you to enter this house.’ ‘It was, and you know it. You, my wife’s former lover--the only man she ever loved--you to creep into my house, as the serpent crept into Eden, under the guise of friendship and good-will, and poison my peace for ever.’ ‘It was your own groundless jealousy that made the poison. From first to last your wife was the purest and noblest of women.’ ‘From first to last!’ exclaimed Christian Harefield, with exceeding bitterness. ‘First, when she introduced you, the lover of her youth, to her husband’s house, last when she fled from that husband with you for her companion. Assuredly the purest and noblest among women, judged by your Italian ethics.’ ‘With me!’ cried the Italian, ‘with me! Your wife fled with me! You say that--say it in good faith.’