But now---- The public shame of it--the divorce which in her eyes must ensue--Andrea! Her courteous, sedate, inexorable husband, whose will she could not bend, whom she could not cajole, whose mind was a closed book to her; a book which had lain by her hand for three years, which she had never had the curiosity to open!--Fay feared her husband, as we all fear what we do not understand. He would divorce her--and then---- And Magdalen at home--and---- A flood of suffocating emotion swept over her, full of ugly swimming and crawling reptiles, and invertebrate horrors, the inevitable scavengers of the sea of selfish passion. Fay shrank back for very life. She could not pass through that flood and live. Nevertheless she felt herself pushed towards it. "But I have no choice. I _must_ speak. He is innocent. He is doing this to shield me because he loves me. But I also love him, far, far more than he loves me, and I will prove it." Fay went in imagination through a fearful and melodramatic scene, in which she revealed everything before a public tribunal. She saw her husband's face darken against her, her lover's lighten as she saved him. She saw her slender figure standing alone, bearing the whole shock, serene, unshaken. The vision moved her to tears. Was it a prophetic vision? It was quite light now, and she crept to her husband's room. She had not seen him during the previous day. He had been out the whole of it. She felt drawn towards him by calamity, by the loneliness of her misery. The duke was not asleep. He was lying in bed with his hands clasped behind his head. His sallow face, worn by a sleepless night, and perhaps by a wounding memory, was turned towards the light, and the new day dealt harshly with it. There were heavy lines under the eyes. The eyes looked steadily in front of him, plunged deep in a past which had something of the irrevocable tenderness of the dawn in it, the holy reflection of an inalienable love. He did not stir as his wife came in. His eyes only moved, resting upon her for a moment, focussing her with difficulty, as if withdrawn from something at a great distance, and then they turned once more to the window. A pale primrose light had risen above the blue tangled mist of ilexes and olives. The cypresses stood half-veiled in mist, half-sharply clear against the stainless pallor of the upper sky. "I am so miserable, Andrea." He did not speak. "I cannot sleep." Still no answer. "I am convinced that Michael is innocent." "It goes without saying." "Then they can't convict him, can they?" "They will convict him," said the duke, and for a moment he bent his eyes upon her. "Has he not accused himself?" "They won't--hang him?" The duke shrugged his shoulders. He did not think fit to enlighten his wife's ignorance of the fact that in Italy there is no capital punishment. "But if he has not done it, and we know he has not," faltered Fay. "He is perhaps shielding someone," said the duke, "the real murderer."