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Rh gutter to me about Madge, but you say that you understand that the whole moral code is a thing of indifference to me. You say I have said so myself. That, Edgar, is not true. I said that the stories which people choose to circulate about my friends do not concern me at all."

She saw her way clearly now.

"Please attend carefully. Even the truth or the falsity of such idle tales does not concern me at all; I will not listen to a word of them. If someone told me hideous tales about you, would it not be vile in me to listen to them? Must not my very trust in you prevent my even considering whether such things are true or not?"

Lucia began to tremble; like all profound actors, she was genuinely affected by what she was saying. He would have interrupted her, but she held up her hand to stop him.

"Please listen," she said. "I don't know, Edgar—indeed, I am beginning to be afraid that I do not know what you mean by love; but to my mind absolute trust is an integral part of it. And if one trusts a person, it seems to me quite impossible to listen to anything against him. You appear to think otherwise. In that case I am afraid I differ from you radically and completely. I hope I shall always differ from you. But"—here Lucia's mouth quivered so that she could hardly form the words—"but I do not know what I have done that you should think these things of me. It is shameful of you."

Edgar felt his brain swim. Two minutes ago Lucia had been saying things that filled him with horror, that shocked and astounded him, and yet now she was all but repeating her own words, and those words had become a perfect gospel of sublime and exalted thought. He had to choose: to stick to his first interpretation of them, or accept the perfectly sound reading of them which Lucia, with tears in her voice and mouth quivering with outraged feeling, now offered him. Such a choice was foregone.

"Ah, Lucia, it was shameful of me," he cried—"shameful. I can't even ask your forgiveness; but if only you would give it me."

She seemed not to be able to speak for a moment, and her hand gripped the back of the chair by which she stood with trembling tension. Then slowly a smile, like the moon looking out from the flying wreaths of storm-cloud, shone through the quivering of her lips, serene and unshaken by the turmoil that had gone on so far below it.