"What is it?... Why did you say you hated me?... What has brought you back?... Is is true? Is it _true_?" From Refrogné's garden came the last good-night-song of the birds. "Love you? Why, from the day I left you--no, from that night I found you here, I've thought nothing but Vitoria, dreamed nothing but Vitoria----" Now incoherent and afraid, then with hectic eloquence and finally with a complete abandon, he poured out his soul in libation to her. With the first word of it, she saw that she was forgiven. "I came," she said, "to--to tell you this: You know now that I ran away from Paris because I loved you and knew that I could not marry you; but you do not know why I said that terrible thing which I said in the tower-room. I was afraid of what my brother might do to you. That is why I would not take your kisses. To try to make you leave before he found you, I said what first came to my mind as likely to drive you away. I said it at what fearful cost! I blasphemed against my love for you." Cartaret was recovering himself. Love gives all, but it demands everything. "Your brother said that I had offered you some insult. He said you'd told him so. I thought you'd told him that in order to make him all the angrier against me." "Ever since Chitta and I returned to our home, he had been suspecting," she said. "He would not forgive me for going away. Chitta he tortured, but she told him nothing. Me, he kept almost a prisoner. When you came, I knew that he would soon guess what was true, so I sent for you that morning to send you away, and when that failed and he found us together, I told him that we loved each other, because I hoped that he would spare the man I loved, even though he would never let me--let me marry that man. I should have known him too well to think that, but I was too afraid to reason--too afraid for your sake. He was so proud that he would not repeat it to you as I said it to him: he repeated it in the way least hateful to him--and after you had gone, I found that all I had done served only to make him try to kill you. Of this I knew nothing until hours later. Then--then----" The birds had ceased their song, but the scent of the lilacs still rose from the garden. "Don't you understand now?" she asked, her cheeks crimson in the fading light. "I guessed you did not understand then; but don't you understand now?" He stood bewildered. She had to go through with it.