He hung his head, and did not speak for a little, while Katherine in all the glory of her fairness regarded him in a rather mystified, rather hurt, but wholly affectionate way, instead of with offended pride, as he had hoped in his self-degradation. Now that he saw his betrothed before him, in her superb health, and with the pride natural to the daughter and heir of a wealthy peer, tempered by honest affection--now, while he had still burning in his brain the remembrance, only an hour or two old, of the slim young beauty showing under fire the courage of her sea-dog forefathers--the image of poor Rusidda faded away. But as the sweet Indian fruit leaves behind it an evil taste, the infidelity to Katherine in having loved Rusidda left a memory as bitter as wormwood. At last he spoke. "I am not fit to kiss you, Kitty Fleet: I have been living for the love of another woman." "What do you mean, Will?" she asked, with burning cheeks. As he did not answer she continued, "I suppose all men are alike when they are long away, though I thought you would have been disdainful of that. I think I can forgive, though I am foolish enough to be disappointed. But you will not see her again?" "She is dead, poor soul." "Death wipes out all debts, even of a life like hers." "I pray so," he said, and then, in his turn, fired up to the roots of his hair. "Kitty, is it possible that you could have thought that of me?" he asked, as a new light broke upon him. "I forgave you; but oh, Will, I am glad it was not that." "Nay, I think it was worse--I forgot you, and loved her with all my heart and soul." Katherine, as she has often told Cecilia, looked at Will, and felt her heart soften. Will's mother had told her how lightly their vows lay on Italian wives; and she felt how Will's fair English face, with its beauty and its haughtiness and its courageousness, must have appealed to such women. She could imagine a tender, lovely wife, who in England would have been beyond the reach of temptation--some woman perhaps supremely lovable--yearning to youth so godlike, and she forgave her the wrong done to his betrothed. "Did you bring her trouble, Will?" "But once--with a sorry jest of proposing for her hand." He told her of his escapade at Syracuse. "And then she married some man she did not love?" "She never married." "And yet----?" "Never--never, Kitty. But afterwards I longed for her as my wife, and begged and prayed her, and tried with my whole heart and strength to will her into marrying me. For weeks and weeks I have lived for nothing else." "And you failed because she was the Princess of Favara and you only a lieutenant in His Majesty's Navy?" "Nay, not that, Kitty. Rusidda loved me more than a brother, and loved that I should love her; let me be with her and caress her as much as I would; prayed that I might make her love me enough to marry me,--to marry me would have been to conquer herself."