“The fault of it is all mine,” said she, as we sat that evening in the gold-and-purple dining-room where we had supped. It was with those words that she broke the silence that had endured throughout the repast, until the departure of the pages and the seneschal who had ministered to us precisely as in the days when Cavalcanti had been alive. “Ah, not that, sweet!” I implored her, reaching a hand to her across the table. “But it is true, my dear,” she answered, covering my hand with her own. “If I had shown you more mercy when so contritely you confessed your sin, mercy would have been shown to me. I should have known from the sign I had that we were destined for each other; that nothing that you had done could alter that. I did know it, and yet...” She halted there, her lip tremulous. “And yet you did the only thing that you could do when your sweet purity was outraged by the knowledge of what I really had been.” “But you were so no more,” she said with a something of pleading in her voice. “It was you--the blessed sight of you that cleansed me,” I cried. “When love for you awoke in me, I knew love for the first time, for that other thing which I deemed love had none of love's holiness. Your image drove out all the sin from my soul. The peace which half a year of penance, of fasting and flagellation could not bring me, was brought me by my love for you when it awoke. It was as a purifying fire that turned to ashes all the evil of desires that my heart had held.” Her hand pressed mine. She was weeping softly. “I was an outcast,” I continued. “I was a mariner without compass, far from the sight of land, striving to find my way by the light of sentiments implanted in me from early youth. I sought salvation desperately--sought it in a hermitage, as I would have sought it in a cloister but that I had come to regard myself as unworthy of the cloistered life. I found it at last, in you, in the blessed contemplation of you. It was you who taught me the lesson that the world is God's world and that God is in the world as much as in the cloister. Such was the burden of your message that night when you appeared to me on Monte Orsaro.” “O, Agostino!” she cried, “and all this being so can you refrain from blaming me for what has come to pass? If I had but had faith in you--the faith in the sign which we both received--I should have known all this; known that if you had sinned you had been tempted and that you had atoned.” “I think the atonement lies here and now, in this,” I answered very gravely. “She was the wife of another who dragged me down. You are the wife of another who have lifted me up. She through sin was attainable. That you can never, never be, else should I have done with life in earnest. But do not blame yourself, sweet saint. You did as your pure spirit bade you; soon all would have been well but that already Messer Pier Luigi had seen you.” She shuddered.