‘Two in the morning! Well, I want you to take me away, now at once, from this place. Isn’t it cruel of me to ask such a thing of you? But I cannot help it. I have been here long enough--too long. I have been here so long that I have--nearly--committed a frightful sin. It is late--it is a strange time to be getting up and going away, I know; but I will go, I must go--and you will come with me.’ She looked at him with an attempt at a smile, and pressed his hands convulsively. Signor Oriole had lived through many strange experiences, through scenes of ‘battle and murder and sudden death,’ through perils of every description, both active and passive. Many a thrill had shot through him in moments when his life had hung on a thread--thrills of excitement, thrills of nervous tension, of fierce exultation, of forlorn hope; but never had he experienced this thrill before--the thrill which is at the same time a cold chill, and which is fear. ‘I will go with you when you have told me one thing,’ he said, and all the blood left his face. ‘You were desperate to-night when you left your husband’s house. How did you leave it? Have you killed him?’ Fulvia rose erect from the bowed-down, crouching position of hopeless misery in which she had been sitting, rose as if electrified; he saw that her whole frame stiffened and grew rigid. Her eyes became fixed, her lips parted; she looked as if her spirit hung in the scales between reason and madness, and as if the balance might incline to madness at a second’s notice. There was some recollection of freezing horror in her soul, which his question, prompted by a flash of inspiration as to the worst that might have happened, had roused again in its full strength. He almost repented him of having asked it, and looked at her, trying to put an expression of tender kindness into his eyes while the awful fear tugged at his heart. Suddenly the expression which so froze him relaxed. Her physical rigidity also gave way. Her very hands became limp and nerveless, and she replied, as if in answer to some everyday question: ‘No. I thought I would. I told him I was going to--and then--I did not. I came away. Now, father, let us go away--quite away.’ ‘At once, with all my heart,’ said he promptly, as he rose and looked about him. The ghastly uncertainty was gone from his heart. The light of reason was in Fulvia’s eyes. He knew she had spoken the truth to him. He was now ready to give himself up to her lightest wish, but, as his eyes fell upon his work and papers, upon the quiet, almost solemnly peaceful room, as his ears again became conscious of the silence which had at first annoyed, but which now soothed them, as he saw, in a side-glance, the broken figure of Fulvia, a load like lead settled on his heart.