“I guessed that from your face.” “Bad for you—bad for me. Gianetta.” “What of Gianetta?” He passed his hand nervously across his lips. “Gianetta is false—worse than false,” he said, in a hoarse voice. “She values an honest man’s heart just as she values a flower for her hair—wears it for a day, then throws it aside for ever. She has cruelly wronged us both.” “In what way? Good Heavens, speak out!” “In the worst way that a woman can wrong those who love her. She has sold herself to the Marchese Loredano.” The blood rushed to my head and face in a burning torrent. I could scarcely see, and dared not trust myself to speak. “I saw her going towards the cathedral,” he went on, hurriedly. “It was about three hours ago. I thought she might be going to confession, so I hung back and followed her at a distance. When she got inside, however, she went straight to the back of the pulpit, where this man was waiting for her. You remember him—an old man who used to haunt the shop a month or two back. Well, seeing how deep in conversation they were, and how they stood close under the pulpit with their backs towards the church, I fell into a passion of anger and went straight up the aisle, intending to say or do something: I scarcely knew what; but, at all events, to draw her arm through mine, and take her home. When I came within a few feet, however, and found only a big pillar between myself and them, I paused. They could not see me, nor I them; but I could hear their voices distinctly, and—and I listened.” “Well, and you heard—” “The terms of a shameful bargain—beauty on the one side, gold on the other; so many thousand francs a year; a villa near Naples—Pah! it makes me sick to repeat it.” And, with a shudder, he poured out another glass of wine and drank it at a draught. “After that,” he said, presently, “I made no effort to bring her away. The whole thing was so cold-blooded, so deliberate, so shameful, that I felt I had only to wipe her out of my memory, and leave her to her fate. I stole out of the cathedral, and walked about here by the sea for ever so long, trying to get my thoughts straight. Then I remembered you, Ben; and the recollection of how this wanton had come between us and broken up our lives drove me wild. So I went up to the station and waited for you. I felt you ought to know it all; and—and I thought, perhaps, that we might go back to England together.” “The Marchese Loredano!” It was all that I could say; all that I could think. As Mat had just said of himself, I felt “like one stunned.” “There is one other thing I may as well tell you,” he added, reluctantly, “if only to show you how false a woman can be. We—we were to have been married next month.” “_We_? Who? What do you mean?” “I mean that we were to have been married—Gianetta and I.” A sudden storm of rage, of scorn, of incredulity, swept over me at this, and seemed to carry my senses away.