“Valeria,” he asked, “have you nothing to say to me?” “Nothing.” “Are you not satisfied with my explanation?” I detected a slight tremor in his voice as he put that question. The tone was, for the first time since we had spoken together, a tone that my experience associated with him in certain moods of his which I had already learned to know well. Among the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation: it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can’t say why) to the happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying. He suddenly stood still, and took me by the hand. He tried to look at me. I kept my head down and my eyes on the ground. I was ashamed of my weakness and my want of spirit. I was determined not to look at him. In the silence that followed he suddenly dropped on his knees at my feet, with a cry of despair that cut through me like a knife. “Valeria! I am vile--I am false--I am unworthy of you. Don’t believe a word of what I have been saying--lies, lies, cowardly, contemptible lies! You don’t know what I have gone through; you don’t know how I have been tortured. Oh, my darling, try not to despise me! I must have been beside myself when I spoke to you as I did. You looked hurt; you looked offended; I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to spare you even a moment’s pain--I wanted to hush it up, and have done with it. For God’s sake don’t ask me to tell you any more! My love! my angel! it’s something between my mother and me; it’s nothing that need disturb you; it’s nothing to anybody now. I love you, I adore you; my whole heart and soul are yours. Be satisfied with that. Forget what has happened. You shall never see my mother again. We will leave this place to-morrow. We will go away in the yacht. Does it matter where we live, so long as we live for each other? Forgive and forget! Oh, Valeria, Valeria, forgive and forget!” Unutterable misery was in his face; unutterable misery was in his voice. Remember this. And remember that I loved him. “It is easy to forgive,” I said, sadly. “For your sake, Eustace, I will try to forget.” I raised him gently as I spoke. He kissed my hands with the air of a man who was too humble to venture on any more familiar expression of his gratitude than that. The sense of embarrassment between us as we slowly walked on again was so unendurable that I actually cast about in my mind for a subject of conversation, as if I had been in the company of a stranger! In mercy to _him_, I asked him to tell me about the yacht. He seized on the subject as a drowning man seizes on the hand that rescues him.