“O Bianca! Forgive me!” I cried. “I did not know! I did not know! I was a poor fool reared in seclusion and ripened thus for the first temptation that should touch me. That is what on Monte Orsaro I sought to expiate, that I might be worthy of the shrine I guarded then. That is what I would expiate now that I might be worthy of the shrine whose guardian I would become, the shrine at which I worship now.” I was bending very low above her little brown head, in which the threads of the gold coif-net gleamed in the fading light. “If I had but had my vision sooner,” I murmured, “how easy it would have been! Can you find mercy for me in your gentle heart? Can you forgive me, Bianca? “O Agostino,” she answered very sadly, and the sound of my name from her lips, coming so naturally and easily, thrilled me like the sound of the mystic music of Monte Orsaro. “What shall I answer you? I cannot now. Give me leisure to think. My mind is all benumbed. You have hurt me so!” “Me miserable!” I cried. “I had believed you one who erred through excess of holiness.” “Whereas I am one who attempted holiness through excess of error.” “I had believed you so, so...O Agostino!” It was a little wail of pain. “Set me a penance,” I implored her. “What penance can I set you? Will any penance restore to me my shattered faith?” I groaned miserably and covered my face with my hands. It seemed that I was indeed come to the end of all my hopes; that the world was become as much a mockery to me as had been the hermitage; that the one was to end for me upon the discovery of a fraud, as had the other ended--with the difference that in this case the fraud was in myself. It seemed, indeed, that our first communion must be our last. Ever since she had seen me step into that gold-and-purple dining-room at Pagliano, the incarnation of her vision, as she was the incarnation of mine, Bianca must have waited confidently for this hour, knowing that it was foreordained to come. Bitterness and disillusion were all that it had brought her. And then, ere more could be said, a thin, flute-like voice hissed down the vaulted gallery: “Madonna Bianca! To hide your beauty from our hungry eyes. To quench the light by which we guide our footsteps. To banish from us the happiness and joy of your presence! Unkind, unkind!” It was the Duke. In his white velvet suit he looked almost ghostly in the deepening twilight. He hobbled towards us, his stick tapping the black-and-white squares of the marble floor. He halted before her, and she put aside her emotion, donned a worldly mask, and rose to meet him. Then he looked at me, and his brooding eyes seemed to scan my face. “Why! It is Ser Agostino, Lord of Nothing,” he sneered, and down the gallery rang the laugh of my cousin Cosimo, and there came, too, a ripple of other voices.