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 "Oh, dear me!" And with that, she uttered some little incoherent sounds of petulant distress; then fell back upon another and even more useless stencil: "Arturo, don't you understand?"

"I am afraid so," he said quietly; but there was something in his voice that made her catch her breath. "You needn't be disturbed. I will not say what you fear I would say. I will never say it."

"Arturo"

"That is all," he said.

Then they stood facing each other, not speaking. Her stencils had not aided her; she knew herself accused but defenseless before the accusation; and helplessly, in her confusion, she found nothing at all to say. She had a sensation as of becoming smaller; and Arturo as he stood before her, slender but vague in the twilight, with tragedy in his dark and gentle eyes, was like a tall judge of her.

The white columns of the cloister and the outlines of the marble fountain, in the wan light, were to remain in her memory as a background like the architectural shapings of a shadowy judgment seat where she had been unable to clear herself of a true charge. But Arturo was an unreproachful judge. Orbison had spoken of him as Hamlet; and just such a sorrowful