"Come, W-Will," she said kindly. "There is no one here to see you, and it is very comfortable. You can quite well stay here until I have a change sent to you. I do not love the Ambassador's wife, but she is generous-hearted, and if I tell her what I have done, and how sorry I am, I know she will see that you get your change without any one knowing it, except your servant." He was a little mollified, but stood irresolute. She laid her hand on his arm to draw him in; her touch thrilled him, and he could resist no longer, especially when, with a sudden impulse, she bent low and kissed his hand, saying: "I have a confession to make--will you forgive me?" "Of course I will: how can I help it?" he replied, but still with a touch of something--anger or hurt--in his voice. "Do not speak till you have heard," she said anxiously, and not far from weeping. "Oh! but I cannot help forgiving you anything." "I hope it is so," she said gently, "for it needs much forgiveness what I am about to tell you. I did it because you are so handsome--such a _grand seigneur_: I could not bear to think that that little homely-looking man with his plainly-fitting clothes, the greatest man in all the world, should look nothing--one of the people--if it were not for the leadership written in his face, beside one of his officers--a mere boy. Yes, you are a mere boy, W-Will, or I would not have done it to you; and I did it to make him laugh at you, and to humiliate you before him, that he might be exalted in my imagination and look like a conqueror. Now strike me or kill me: I have told you the whole truth." "Rusidda," said Will, addressing her thus for the first time, and taking her hands to hold her, while he looked into her burning face as if he were going to see through into her soul, "you have hurt me on my tenderest point; but I have forgiven you, because no one saw it but yourself and my Admiral, and him I so worship and reverence that I would go through not only death but humiliation for his sake. And you I love." Her great grey Sicilian eyes, which could look black or blue in certain lights, and which had been fixed nervously on his, fell before his gaze, and he thought that she was won. She let him kiss her without resisting, and it was a good many seconds before she could find words to stem the impetuous torrent of love in which he half besought her, half claimed her for his wife after all. At last she managed to say: "W-Will--yes, I can call you dear W-Will--I can never marry you." "Why?" he broke in: "you cannot have become betrothed to another, or you would not have spoken as you have about friendship. I know how strict is the etiquette of your Sicilian betrothals." "Oh no, I am not betrothed," she sighed, "nor ever can be." "You are not under a monastic vow?" he asked. He knew nothing of such vows, but felt that now, when all Europe was a battle-field, the sword might find a way to cut many knots.