For Hera it was a withering disappointment. Hers was no romantic schoolgirl’s attachment, but the full-powered, storm-surviving passion of a woman of twenty-four--a passion heeding no call before that of itself. And fondly she had dreamed that with Mario it was the same. But the message told her--what a different story! He confessed a love stronger, higher than that which he bore for her--the love of justice, a lifeless abstraction. Suddenly he became little in her eyes, and she recoiled from the chill of such a nature. Here then was the desolate ending of the sweet poem life had begun to read for her; the shattering of a beautiful faith, the farewell to an ideal that had budded in girlhood and blossomed with woman’s estate. The sound of an affected cough startled her and Don Riccardo from their gloomy reflections. They looked up and beheld Tarsis at the threshold, but they were not in time to see the contented smile of comprehension that had curved his lip. “I beg your pardon,” he said, moving toward them. “The outer door was open, and I took the liberty of entering unannounced. I did not know you were here.” Hera arose and walked to where her father stood surveying Tarsis with eyes that betrayed an emotion of anger strange indeed to the happy-go-lucky Duke. She asked him for the telegram, and absently he placed it in her hand. “It is better, I think, that you leave us for the present,” she said, in a low voice. “What shall you do?” Don Riccardo asked, his impulse to intercede going the way it had gone often before. “That which honor commands,” she answered, coldly, desperately. So Don Riccardo, torn by warring impulses, but unable to be more than nature had ordained, made off slowly, to wait in the library, with a glass at his elbow and a cigar in his lips. “The answer from Rome has arrived,” Hera said, and gave Tarsis the message. Without betrayal of his eagerness to know that his scheme had not miscarried, he began to read it. “I was sure Signor Forza’s sense of justice would prevail,” he said, looking up from the paper, not the faintest note of triumph in his tone. “Believe me, Hera, it is better so--better for you as well as me. You will be glad that he did not counsel you to do me a wrong. I honor him greatly.” It needed no words from her to tell him that his appreciation of such heroism was not shared by the woman whom it sacrificed--a fact he had counted upon to make his victory certain. “Oh, it is impossible,” Hera exclaimed, as one yielding to an unconquerable aversion. “Heaven help me! I cannot!” Tarsis perceived that his victory was yet to be won. He drew nearer to her, and stood by the table on which she leaned, head in hands. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “I cannot, oh, I cannot,” was all she could answer. “Do you mean that you would break your last promise as well as the first?” he asked, aggressively. “My last promise?” she repeated, as if bewildered in mind.