Page:Maurice Hewlett--Little novels of Italy.djvu/262

250 what to say; I had never expected, never looked, nor even asked—ah, Madonna," he suddenly cried, and found himself upon his knees, "what am I to say to you for this speech of yours?"

Selvaggia, white enough now, froze hard. "Do you mean," she said slowly, in words that fell one by one, like cuts from a deliberate whip, "do you mean that you do not love me, Messer Cino, after all?"

"You are a light to my eyes and a lantern to my feet," Cino murmured: but she did not seem to hear.

"Do you mean," she went on, "that you are not prepared to be—to be my—my betrothed?"

It was done: now let the heavens fall! She could not ask the man to marry her, but it came to the same thing; she had practically committed that unpardonable sin; she had approached love to wedlock, a mystery to a bargain, the rapt converse of souls in heaven to a wrangle over the heeltaps in a tavern parlour. She was a heretic whom any Court of Love must excommunicate. The thing was so serious that it brought Cino to his feet, severe, formal, an Assessor of Civil Causes. He spread out his hands as if to wave aside words he should never have heard. He had found his tongue, for he was now contemplating the Abstract.

"Be very sure, most sacred Lady," said he, "that no bodily torment could drive me to such sacrilege as your noble humility leads you to contemplate. No indeed! Wretchedly unworthy as I am to live in the light of your eyes, I am not yet fallen so far. There are yet seeds of grace