“Oh, Abel, I am telling you everything! I am unveiling my heart to you! How will you receive my confession? Will you believe that there was no conscious sense of wrongdoing at the time? But, indeed, there was none. Will you believe the stranger truth that this was not love which I gave to Luigi? I did not know what love meant until I met the one love of my life—years after this lunacy. Oh, Abel, believe that this delirium was not love, though even I, knowing no better, mistook it for love at the time. It was madness; it was hero-worship, enthusiasm. But not love. This young Italian exile, beautiful as Adonis in his person, was idealized and glorified in my vision by his history. “Remember how young I was—scarcely past childhood; and remember how I had lived isolated from all society of my own rank and age, secluded in a desolate old manor house on the Irish, coast, whose very name—Weirdwaste—could not tell its dreariness; spending my solitary life in wandering by the seashore during the days, reading the old romances and poems left on the bookshelves of the old manor house, and dreaming dreams and seeing visions that seemed to have come to be realized in my present surroundings and crystallized in the person of Saviola. “Oh, Abel! Oh, Abel! Pity and pardon me if you can, for now I come to the part of my life which I shrink from approaching as a child would shrink from a fierce fire. “Luigi came every day now, whether Anglesea accompanied him or not. I had learned a little Italian from Miss Murray, at Weirdwaste, and now Madame de la Champe was continuing my studies in that language. “Luigi found it out, and begged her permission to bring me some standard Italian works and to assist me in the translation. “Madame, who looked upon me only as a child, and thought the attention of the young Italian so many tributes to her own charms, very affably consented, and so the exile became my unpaid master in Italian. “The ‘standard’ works he brought were all poetry—Petrarch’s, Tasso’s and others’ impassioned songs. These he translated for me in more ways than one—with his pen, with his tongue, and more eloquently and effectively still with his glorious eyes. “As for me, I was far gone in madness before Luigi ever had the opportunity to speak one direct word of love to me. “The inevitable hour came at last. I was reading Italian poetry with Luigi. “Madame de la Champe sat near, working a screen in Berlin wool. Suddenly she got up and left the room to match some shade of worsted. “The next instant Saviola was at my feet, and, in a sudden tempest of impassioned words, he told me what his eyes had told me long ago. “This was the first time we had been alone since we had met on the esplanade, and he had seized the occasion. “I could not reply to him; but I did not repulse him, and he saw that I did not wish to do so. “‘Madame!’ I whispered, as I heard the Frenchwoman’s approach, which had not attracted his attention.