Ilaria looked at him, and she saw the love upon his face, like a sunset streaming through a cloud. She pitied him for a moment, but hardened her heart the more. "I am weary of the world," she said. "Weary, Ilaria? Are you not free?" She looked at him quizzically. "The wife of Raniero Frangipani?" "Have you not broken the chains?" "Mine the forging--mine the suffering," she said, almost with a moan. "Though I have left him, I am not free. Nor are you! Though you burn your garb--you are forever a monk--the slave of Rome! Who is free in life?" she added, after a brief pause. "I am fearful of the ruffian passions of the world,--the lusts and the terrors,--even love itself! Life seethes with turbulence and the great throes of wrath. I would be at peace,--I have suffered--God, how I have suffered!" Francesco rose up suddenly, and began to stride to and fro before her. He loved Ilaria, he knew it at this moment, with all the strongest fibres of his heart. He had hoped too much, trusted too much to the power of his own faith. He turned and faced her, there, outwardly calm, miserable within. "Must this thing be?" he asked her. There was such deep wistfulness in those words of his that she bent her head and would not look into his face. "Francesco," she said, "I pray you, plead no further with my heart. I shall turn nun,--there is the truth." "As you will--" he said, and a cord seemed to snap in his heart. "It is not for me to parley with your soul, not for me to revive a past that had best never been!" Ilaria's gaze seemed far away. Her eyes, under their dark lashes, seemed like spring violets hiding in shadows. There was an infinite pride, an infinite tenderness in the wistful face, as she turned to Francesco. "Ah," she said with a sudden kindling, "why has it been decreed thus? I think my whole soul was made for beauty, my whole desire born for fair and lovely things. You will smile at me for a dreamer,--dreaming still, after the devastating storms of life have spent themselves over my head,--but often my thoughts seem to fly through forests, marvellous green glooms all drowned in moonlight. I love to hear the wind, to watch the great oaks battling, to see the sea, one laugh of gold. Now, every sunset harrows me into a moan of woe. Yet I can still sing to the stars at night, songs such as the woods weave from the voice of a gentle wind, dew-laden, green and lovely. Sometimes I feel faint for sheer love of this fair earth." Francesco's eyes were on her with a strange, deep look. Every fibre of his being, every hidden instinct cried out in him to fold her in his arms, to hold her there forevermore, safe from the world, from harm. But, as if she had divined his thoughts, she drew away from him.