‘Ah, repeatedly!’ she exclaimed, suddenly seizing his arm in her hands, as she had so often done as a child, and smiling at him with a child’s delight. Then, with a sudden revulsion of feeling: ‘Don’t, don’t! Do not talk to me about those days, Beppo. I am miserable enough, without having my former happiness recalled to me.’ He came to a pause, took her hands in his, and looked into her face with an expression which, she told herself, was almost divine, in its immense love and tenderness, its sorrow, its yearning. ‘Carissima mia, I recall your former happiness because I would save you from future misery. Speak to me face to face! The man there, who was with you, is dear to you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Fulvia, with dilated eyes, and in a whisper. ‘I say nothing about it. I have lived my life, and others will live their lives, and no experience of others can save them from walking straight up to their fate. That you should encounter some such experience was absolutely inevitable. Only listen to me. Suppose that characters could be taken in the hand like oranges, and weighed in a balance like any material thing; suppose I held the scales, and placed your character on the one side, and his on the other: do you know what would happen?’ She looked at him breathlessly. ‘Why, his would kick the beam,’ said Signor Oriole, with a scornful laugh. ‘My proud Fulvia in love with a thing of straw--at the mercy of a _farceur_.’ She grew rigid, and an angry light came into her eyes. ‘You are utterly mistaken,’ she said very coldly. ‘I know him; you do not. You have no right to speak of him in that way. As for future misery’--she laughed--‘no misery could be greater than that which I have endured, and which I am enduring at present. I am going back to it now at once. Good-bye.’ She snatched her hands out of the clasp of his, and, without giving him a look, sped on in the direction of the house. CHAPTER XXIII. Arrived at the house, Fulvia was met almost at once by a servant, who told her that her husband was very ill and in severe pain. ‘I will go to him,’ she said in a perfectly unmoved voice, and when the servant had gone she closed her eyes for a moment, as if to shut out what was immediately around her. In truth, she needed all the strength that lay in her nature to give her the courage, coming from the interviews she had just had, to encounter what she knew lay before her.