Cleotos listened for a moment in perplexed wonderment, and then, for his sole answer, dropped her hand and turned away. She understood him as well as though he had spoken the words of refusal. 'You will not take me with you, then; is it not so?' she said. 'Some nice point of pride, or some feeling of fancied wrong, or craving for revenge, or, perhaps, love for another person, tells you now to separate yourself from me! And yet you loved me once. This, then, is man's promised faith!' 'You dare to talk to me of faith and broken vows!' he exclaimed, after a moment of speechless amazement at her hardiness in advancing such a plea. 'You, who for weeks have treated me with scorn and indifference--who have plotted against me, until my life itself has been brought into danger--who, apart from all that, cast me off when first we met in Rome, telling me then that I was and could be nothing to you, yes, even that our association from the first had been a mistake and a wrong! Yes, Leta, there was a time when I truly loved you, as man had never then done, or since, or ever will again; but impute not to me the blame that I cannot do so now.' 'I was to blame,' she said; and it seemed that this night must be a night of confession for her, in so few things could she justify herself by denial or argument. 'I acknowledge my fault, and how my heart has been drawn from you by some delusion, as powerful and resistless as though the result of magic. But when I confess it freely, and tell you how I now see my duty and my heart more clearly, as though a veil of after all, I find no forgiveness in your heart, said I not truly that man's faith cannot be trusted? Am I not the same Leta as of old?' 'The same as of old?' he exclaimed. 'Can you look earnestly and truthfully into your soul, and yet avow that you are the pure-hearted girl who roamed hand in hand with me only a year ago, in our native isle, content to have no ambition except that of living a humble life with me? And now, with your simple tastes and desires swept away--with your soul covered with love of material pleasures as with a lava crust--wrapt up in longing for Rome's most sinful, artificial excesses--having, for gold or position or power or ambition, or what not, so long as it was not for love, given yourself up a willing victim to a heartless master--do you dare, after this, to talk to me of love, and call yourself the same?' 'And are you one of those who believe that there can be no forgiveness for repentant woman?'