“If he should have seen us!” was her cry; and it moved me unpleasantly that such should have been the first thought my kiss inspired in her. “If he should have seen us! Gesu! I have enough to bear already!” “I care not,” said I. “Let him see. I am not Messer Gambara. No man shall put an insult upon you on my account, and live.” I was become the very ranting, roaring, fire-breathing type of lover who will slaughter a whole world to do pleasure to his mistress or to spare her pain--I--I--I, Agostino d'Anguissola--who was to be ordained next month and walk in the ways of St. Augustine! Laugh as you read--for very pity, laugh! “Nay, nay,” she reassured herself. “He will be still abed. He was snoring when I left.” And she dismissed her fears, and looked at me again, and returned to the matter of that kiss. “What have you done to me, Agostino?” I dropped my glance before her languid eyes. “What I have done to no other woman yet,” I answered, a certain gloom creeping over the exultation that still thrilled me. “O Giuliana, what have you done to me? You have bewitched me; You have made me mad!” And I set my elbows on my knees and took my head in my hands, and sat there, overwhelmed now by the full consciousness of the irrevocable thing that I had done, a thing that must brand my soul for ever, so it seemed. To have kissed a maid would have been ill enough for one whose aims were mine. But to kiss a wife, to become a cicisbeo! The thing assumed in my mind proportions foolishly, extravagantly beyond its evil reality. “You are cruel, Agostino,” she whispered behind me. She had come to lean again upon the back of the bench. “Am I alone to blame? Can the iron withstand the lodestone? Can the rain help falling upon the earth? Can the stream flow other than downhill?” She sighed. “Woe me! It is I who should be angered that you have made free of my lips. And yet I am here, wooing you to forgive me for the sin that is your own.” I cried out at that and turned to her again, and I was very white, I know. “You tempted me!” was my coward's cry. “So said Adam once. Yet God thought otherwise, for Adam was as fully punished as was Eve.” She smiled wistfully into my eyes, and my senses reeled again. And then old Busio, the servant, came suddenly forth from the house upon some domestic errand to Giuliana, and thus was that situation mercifully brought to an end.