To Ragna, realising as she needs must, from his first involuntary start, his look of horror and surprise, what a shock her bald announcement had been to him, his quick recovery, the tender simplicity of his response seemed little short of miraculous; she had not dared hope for so much. A lump rose in her throat and the hand that lay in his trembled. "There, there, little one, tell me all!" He spoke again, soothingly, as he would have spoken to a child; he did not guess that the tears welling up in her eyes were tears of relief, of joy, the reaction from the oppression of dread. So Ragna told her tale, the terrible discovery that she was about to become a mother-- "Why did you not write to me then?" he interrupted. "Ah, dear," she answered, "I was too ashamed, I only wanted to hide myself from all who knew me, from you, most of all, because you loved me!" "The very reason why you should have come to me," he reproved quietly; "Ah, well, you did not, more's the pity. Think of it, Ragna, we might have been so happy." "God knows I should have been a better woman, at least," she said bitterly, "not the hard cynical creature I have become!" "You hard and cynical, my little Ragna?" "Wait until you have heard all, and you will see whether I have not had good reason for it," she rejoined. The tenderness called forth in response to his own had died away under the bitter memories evoked by the recital of her trials. With growing hardness in her voice, she told of Valentini's offer, of her acceptance and of their marriage--and at this point of her tale she dared not look at Angelescu's face but kept her eyes obstinately fixed on the driver's back, and even as she talked, was curiously conscious of the brown and grey stripes of the man's coat and the deep crease in it where it bulged over the iron rail round the top of the box. She went on and told of her rapid disillusionment, hiding nothing, using words brutal in their revealing frankness, such as she had often used to herself; then of the birth of Mimmo, of that of Beppino, of the increasing unhappiness of her life, as time went on, and lastly of Carolina's story, the death of Fru Boyesen, the loss of her hopes, and the culminating scene of the morning. She reached this point as the carriage drove past the gate of the Torre al Gallo, where Galileo lived and worked, and through the little town of Arcetri, perched on the hill-top.