Isabel sprang up and faced him. Their eyes were less than a yard apart. Antonio's continued silence was sufficient answer; but she fought fiercely against the truth. Clasping her white hands desperately against her breast, she challenged him in short, panting sentences. "This is horrible, too horrible," she began, "I tell you it is too horrible. You can't, you daren't look me in the eyes and say you don't love me!" And when he still delayed to speak she raised her voice and commanded sharply: "Answer!" He looked her in the eyes with immeasurable sadness, and answered: "I do not love you in the way you mean." "The way I mean? What is the way I mean? Either you love me or you don't. There are no two ways in love." She spoke hotly and with scorn. "In the paper you've just torn up," he replied, "you called me your dearest friend in the world. In that sense, I love you. In all the world, you are my dearest friend." "And no more? Not an atom more?" He hesitated. "Come," she said bitterly. "You are trying me too far. If this is some subtlety, some finesse, let us save it until another day. For the last time, I ask you: Can you stand up here in the sight of the God you believe in, and say that I am no more to you than your dearest friend?" It came home to Antonio that he could not, with perfect truthfulness, say that she was his friend and no more. Yet how was he to evade her question? Plainly the cruel, hateful moment had come for striking the fair vase to pieces, for driving the butcher's knife into the white lamb's heart. He raised his head and resumed the mastery over her by a single movement of his inextinguishable will. "My dearest friend in the world," he said gently. "If I am to blame for the smallest fraction of this wonderful and terrible thing which has come to pass, I crave your pardon here and now with all my heart, and I will ask God's pardon every day until I die. But ... for God's sake, let us forget. Let yesterday and to-day be as if they had never been. How a woman like you could ever waste one thought of love on a man like me neither of us can explain." She heard him with wildly staring eyes. "You offer me," he concluded, "a gift beyond all price. But I must turn my back, I must close my eyes, I must stop my ears. I am pledged to another Bride." They were the words he had used to Senhor Jorge. But, this time, he uttered them proudly; for he had meditated upon them often since the serão. He knew that they were not a mean verbal quibble, and that they enshrined the foremost fact of his life. As they left his lips the spiritual world was as real and near as the cascade, as real and near as the mossy boulder, as real and near as Isabel.