When Castiglione came on the following afternoon Maria was looking wonderfully well, and so like herself, as she had been within the first year of her marriage, that he could not help looking at her very hard. There was only the small patch of white in her dark hair near the left temple, which Castiglione could not remember; and there was the black frock. She always wore black or grey now, but when she was very young she had liked pretty colours.

Castiglione himself was in uniform, for he thought it possible that he might see Leone, and he would not have broken his promise to the boy for anything. He was not the man to put on his uniform with the idea of looking better in it than in a civilian’s clothes, still less had he any thought of recalling old memories to Maria by such theatrical means. Men who are hard hitters are rarely theatrical in small things, though some famous generals, like Napoleon, have been great dramatic artists.

In Italy the uniforms of the cavalry regiments do not differ as much as in some other countries, and but for the colour of the facings and a few smaller details Castiglione’s dress was enough like the uniform of the Piedmont Lancers to produce a much deeper impression on Maria than he could have easily understood. The man himself had changed little. He was a little broader perhaps, his strong features were a little more marked, his military moustache was heavier, but that was all. At thirty, or nearly that, he was much the same active, energetic, good-looking young officer he had been at two and twenty.

They instinctively took the places they had sat in during his first visit. The hour was the same, the light in the room was the same, too; but other things were not the same. Castiglione felt it as soon as he saw Maria’s face, and she knew it when she heard the sound of his voice. The ice-wall that had stood between them so long had melted away; the chasm that separated Maria even from that barrier was bridged. It would not be easy now to touch hands and part again for years.

The stern old monk’s words echoed faintly in Maria’s heart: to meet thus was a deadly risk, perhaps a mortal sin. But the voice was far away, and Maria was very happy and hopeful, and the old Capuchin had been a common and ignorant man who could not understand the pride and self-respect of a Roman lady, nor the generous honour of such a man as Baldassare del Castiglione.

‘I was right to telephone last night, was I not?’ he asked when they were seated.

‘Yes, quite right. But Teresa has always seemed to be a good friend. She may have been annoyed because she had made such a stupid mistake, but I really don’t think she will gossip about us.’

‘I hope not, though I don’t trust her.’

After this there was a little silence, for he would not make conversation; and while he waited for Maria to speak, his eyes were satisfied, and his heart beat quietly and happily because he was near her. He did not feel the heavy, passionate pulse that used to throb in his neck when he came near her, nor the dryness in his throat, with the strange, cool quivering of his own lips. He was simply and quietly happy, and he trusted himself and her.

‘You have come for your answer,’ she said, after a long time. ‘It’s of no use to pretend that we have anything else to talk of. We will be honest with each other. There is no one to hear what we say, and we have nothing to say now of which we need be ashamed before God.’

Castiglione silently bent his head in assent and waited.

‘The forgiveness you asked of me yesterday, I should have asked of you, too,’ Maria went on, but her eyes looked down. ‘I ask it now, before I say anything more.’

‘I don’t understand,’ answered the man. ‘How can I have anything to forgive?’

‘Balduccio, do you remember the hard words I said to you under the ilex-trees when we parted?’

‘A condemned man does not forget the words of his sentence.’ His voice was dull.

‘I called you a coward and a brute, Balduccio, and I called you the basest of mankind.’

‘It was your right.’

‘No. It was not. I take back those words. I ask your pardon for them.’

‘What?’ His voice rang in the room, hoarse and strong.

‘I take back every word. I was the coward. I made myself believe what I said, and I know you would believe it too. I have been a very wicked woman all these years, Balduccio. I have been wickedly unjust to you. You must try to forgive me.’

Her voice had sunk very low, for it had been hard to say; but his almost broke in his throat.

‘Try? Ah, Maria——’

He moved quickly to come near her, and she was aware of it. Still looking down, she stretched out her hand against him.

‘Sit still!’ she said. ‘Say that you forgive me, if you can.’

‘With all my soul,’ he answered, drawing back into his chair, obedient to her gesture.

‘Thank you,’ she said, so low that he could hardly hear her.

With that she leaned far back in her low chair and pressed her fingers upon her eyes without covering her face, and he saw the warmth come and go in her soft pale cheeks, and then come back again. Indeed, it had not been easy for her. Presently she opened her eyes, and folded her hands on her lap, and gazed happily into his face.

‘I can look at you now,’ she said simply, ‘and it is not wrong.’

‘No, indeed!’

But he did not know what he was saying, nor what he should say, for in a moment she had changed all the greater thoughts of his life. She had taken from him the burden of the old accusation which she had made him believe was just in spite of himself; but it was like lifting heavy weights from a balance very suddenly; the whole mechanism of his mind and conscience quivered and trembled when the strain was gone, and swung violently this way and that.

Presently she was speaking again, and he began to hear and understand.

‘I am not going to pretend anything,’ she was saying. ‘But I will not hide anything either. No, I will not! There is nothing to be ashamed of now, because we have made up our minds that there never shall be again. We promise each other that, don’t we, Balduccio?’

‘I promise you that, come what may,’ he answered, well knowing what he said now.

‘And I promise the same, come what may,’ she said. ‘I give you my word of honour.’

‘You have mine, Maria.’

‘That is enough, and God believes us,’ she said gravely. ‘But now the truth, and nothing else. We are not going to pretend that we are like brother and sister. We love each other dearly, and we love as man and woman, and I am sure we always shall, now and for ever, in life, and beyond death, and in the life to come. I am very sure of that.’

He bent his head and nodded slowly, but that was not enough for her.

‘Are you not sure, Balduccio?’ she asked after a moment.

He looked up suddenly with blazing eyes.

‘I love you now,’ he said. ‘I have loved you all my life. That is what I know. If there is a God, He knows it, for He made it so, and it will be so for ever. If not, it will end when we are both dead, but not before.’

‘It will never end,’ Maria answered. ‘But it must not be a weight to drag us down, it must be a strength to lift us. It shall be! Say that it shall be!’

‘I will do what I can.’

‘Balduccio,’ she went on earnestly, ‘it has lifted us already. It has made you live a better life than other men, though you do not believe in God. And though it made me a coward for a long time, it has given me strength to be brave at last, now that we have met again, strength to tell you the truth, strength to ask your forgiveness! If it has done all that already, what will it not do hereafter, if we keep our promise?’

The deep and fearless light was in her dark eyes now, and she spoke in a heavenly inspiration of purity and peace. Castiglione watched her with a sort of awe which he had never felt in his life. That was a brave, high instinct in him that answered her call; it was the instinct that would have responded if he had been chosen to lead the forlorn hope in a fight all but lost.

‘You are a saint,’ he said. ‘I am not. But I will try to follow if you will only lead the way.’

‘No, dear, I am no saint,’ she answered.

He started at the loving word she had scarcely ever used with him, and she saw his movement and understood.

‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘It is the truth, and we are not the less safe for saying that we love, now that we have promised. No, I am not a saint. You have been better than I in all these years, for I have been unjust to you, but you have borne it patiently and you have loved me still. That is what I mean when I say that our love can lift us up. Do you see? Only—we must not forget the others——’

She paused.

‘Montalto,’ said Castiglione gravely. ‘I understand.’

‘My husband and my son,’ Maria said. ‘We owe them a terrible debt.’

Castiglione’s eyes softened.

‘It is for their sakes that we have promised,’ she went on. ‘For their sakes there must never again be any earthly taint upon our love, dear.’

Once more the tender word touched him. He passed his hand over his eyes as if to hide something.

‘If you were only free!’ he sighed.

Maria made a little movement.

‘The very thought of that is wrong,’ she answered bravely. ‘You must not think of it, you must never say it.’

‘I wish your husband no ill,’ Castiglione answered, in a sterner tone than she had heard yet. ‘I did him a great injury. I would make reparation if I knew how. But I am a man, Maria, a man like any other, and I love you in a man’s way, and if Montalto died I should want you for my wife, as you should be. We have promised that between us there shall be no word or thought of which we need be ashamed, even before your husband, if he were here; but more than that I will not promise, and that is already as much as any man could keep.’

Maria shook her head gravely and waited a moment before she answered.

‘I should owe myself to his memory if he were dead,’ she said at last. ‘A lifetime of faithfulness, cost what it may, is not enough to expiate what I did.’

Castiglione judged her as men judge the women they love, and he knew that for the present it was useless to oppose her. He folded his hands and listened, and she did not see that his fingers strained upon each other; nor could she guess that his heart was not beating as quietly now as when he had sat down opposite her a little while ago.

‘That is the one condition on which we can see each other,’ she went on. ‘There must be no thought of any earthly union—ever! If you feel that you are strong enough for that, Balduccio, then come back to Rome as soon as you can. If you can exchange into your old regiment again, do so. If not, come now and then, when you can get leave. We may see each other once a week, at least once a week! The world cannot blame us for that, after all these years. It will be little enough, once a week! And sometimes, perhaps, we might meet in some gallery, in some quiet museum where only the foreigners go, and we could walk about and talk, and the world will never know it.’

Castiglione smiled at her innocent ignorance of lovers’ tricks, for he was quieter now, and very happy at the thought of seeing her often. It would never have occurred to him to do the foolish thing of which Teresa Crescenzi had suspected him on the previous afternoon.

‘The great matter is that I am to see you,’ he said; ‘that the separation is over, and that we love each other!’

‘That—yes! Oh, that above and beyond all things, and for ever and ever.’

The lovelight was in her eyes as she gazed at him, and her parted lips were delicately beautiful. Again his hands pressed one another very hard, and he felt that he set his teeth. He suddenly wondered how long he could keep his promise, and by what manner of death he would choose to end his life when he felt that he was going to break it. She was putting upon him a heavier trial and a far harder expiation than she knew. Her eyes were so dark and tender, her parted lips were so sweet to see! In her reliance on herself and him she had already loosened the great restraint that had bound her since the evil hour; she cared not to hide the outward looks of love. She even longed to see in his eyes what she felt in her own.

‘You love me less than I love you, dear,’ she said softly. ‘You are less happy than I am, because we are to meet often!’

Without a word Castiglione rose from his seat and went to the window at the further end of the room, and stood there, looking down through the slits of the blinds. Maria half understood, and sighed.

‘Forgive me,’ she said, rather sorrowfully.

‘I’m only a man, Maria,’ he answered, turning his head. ‘You must not make it too hard for me. I love you in a man’s way, and you have made me promise to love you in yours. I must learn, before I can be sure of myself.’

Maria reflected a moment. Her thoughts were full of an ideal sacrifice.

‘Balduccio!’ She called to him gently, for he was looking down at the street again. ‘Shall I give you back your word and tell you to go away for a long time, if it’s going to be so hard for you?’

‘No!’

The single syllable was rough and strong, for he resented what she had said. She rose too and went to him at the window.

‘Are you angry with me?’ she asked humbly.

His hand grasped her bare wrist and tightened upon it almost as if he meant to hurt her, and he spoke in short, harsh sentences.

‘No, I am not angry. I love you too much. You don’t understand what I feel. How should you? I’ve been as faithful to you as you’ve been to your husband all these years. And now I’m with you, and we are alone, and we love each other, and I’m nothing but a man after all—and if you look at me in the old way I shall go mad or kill you.’

He drew her wrist roughly to him and kissed her hand once, roughly, and dropped it. He had done that in the old days too, and Maria saw it all again in a violent flash, as men see danger ahead in a storm at night, lit up by quivering lightning.

She drew breath sharply and turned away from him. She leaned upon the mantelpiece and rested her throbbing forehead upon her hands.

‘Oh, why have we these earthly bodies of ours?’ she moaned. ‘Why? why? Why could not God have made us like the angels?’

‘Why not, indeed!’ echoed Castiglione, in bitter unbelief.

‘Even like the fallen angels!’ she cried desperately. ‘They fell by pride, but not by this! Are there not temptations for heart and soul and mind enough to try us, to raise us up if we overcome, to damn us if we yield? Enough to send us to hell or heaven—without this? O God, that what Thou hast made in Thine own image should be so vile, so vile, so vile!’

Her despair was real; her cry came from an almost breaking heart. Castiglione came to her now and laid his hand gently upon her shoulder.

‘Maria! Look at me, dear! Don’t be afraid!’

She raised her head timidly from her hands and turned her eyes slowly to him, more than half afraid. But when she saw that his own were calm and grave again, she gave one little cry of relief and buried her face upon his shoulder, clinging to him with both hands; and her touch did not stir his pulse now.

‘No, I’m not afraid of you!’ she softly cried. ‘It was only a moment, dear, only one dreadful moment, for I trust you with myself as I would trust you with my soul! Sometimes—’ she looked up lovingly to his face—‘sometimes each of us must be brave for both, you know. As we are now, you might even kiss me once and I should fear nothing!’

He smiled and bent down and kissed her cheek; and there was no thought in him that he would not have told her. But then he gently took her hands from his shoulder and made her sit down as they had sat before.

‘That was not wrong, was it?’ she asked, with a happy smile.

‘No,’ he answered quietly, ‘there was no wrong in that, neither to you nor to the others.’

‘I’m glad,’ she answered, ‘so glad! But it would not be right to do it often.’

‘No, not often. Not for a long time again.’

They were both silent in the ebbing of the tide which at the full had nearly swept them from their feet. At heart, in spite of all, there was something strangely innocent in them both. Castiglione’s friends would have wondered much if they could have understood him, as some of the graver sort might. Few men of his age, beyond the cloister, knew less of women’s ways and women’s love than he; few soldiers, indeed, and surely not one of his brother officers. To wear the King’s uniform ten years in the gayest and smartest cavalry regiment of the service is not a school for austere virtue or innocence of heart. All that Castiglione’s comrades noticed was that he talked but little of women, who were often the chief subject of the others’ conversation, and that he was very reticent about the ones he knew. They respected him for that, on the whole, though they sometimes chaffed him a little in a friendly way. They all agreed among themselves that he had some secret and lasting attachment for a woman of their own class whose name he succeeded in keeping from them in spite of their repeated attempts to find it out. He was such a manly man that they liked him the better for it; the more, because great reticence was not their own chief quality. For the rest, though, he was poorer than most of them, he was always ready to join in anything except a general raid on womankind. He played cards with them, and when he could lose no more, he said so; he was honest in matters of horseflesh and gave sound advice; he never shirked his duty and left it for another to do; he was good-natured in doing a comrade’s work when he was asked to do it for any good reason; he was the best rider in the regiment, and he never talked about what he had done, or could do, with a horse; he was not over clever, but he was good company and told a story with a touch of humour; and he never borrowed from a brother officer, nor refused to lend, if he had any money. Altogether, he was the best comrade in the world and everybody liked and respected him, from the rather supercilious colonel, who was an authentic duke, and the crabbed old major, who had been wounded at Dogali, to the rawest recruit that was drafted in from a Sardinian village or a shepherd’s hut in the Apennines.

But none of all those who liked and respected him guessed that in the arts of love he was considerably behind the youngest subaltern in the regiment, at least, so far as his own experience was concerned, for he could have written volumes about that of the rest as described by themselves. As a cadet, indeed, he had not been a model of austerity; but he had fallen in love with Maria a few days after he had received his commission, and such as he had been then he had remained ever since, except for her. If his colonel had known this, he would have smiled sarcastically and would have said that Castiglione was a case of arrested development, the old major would have stared at him stupidly without in the least comprehending that such a man could exist, and the rest of the mess would have roared with laughter and called him a crazy sentimentalist. But none of them knew the truth, and he had lived his life in his own way. There are not many men in the great world like Baldassare del Castiglione, but there are a few; and in the little world, in simple countries, there are more of them than the great world ever dreams of.

This long digression, if it be one, is to explain why Castiglione accepted Maria’s strangely exalted plan for the future of both, instead of telling her quite frankly that the chances in favour of its success were too small for poor humanity to count upon, and that the best way was to part again and to meet very rarely or not at all, until the fire of life should be extinguished in the grey years, and they could look at each other without seeing so much as a spark of it left in each other’s tired eyes. That is what he would have done, as a man of honour, if he had known as many other women of his own class intimately as some of his comrades did. Or, if he had been like them in other things too, and had loved Maria less truly, he would have sat down to besiege the fortress he had once stormed, and would have gone to work scientifically to demolish its defences, making pretence of accepting the trusting woman’s generous offer in order to outwit and conquer her by slow degrees. And if he had done either the one or the other, that is to say, if he had understood women’s ways, this would either have been the story of a vulgar fault, or it would have ended abruptly with Castiglione’s departure.

It is neither. Baldassare was innocent enough as well as honourable enough to believe that he and Maria could keep the promise they had made; and he loved her so dearly that the prospect of seeing her often was like a vision of heaven already half realised.

So on that day they began the new life together, trusting that they could live it faithfully to the end, but truly resolved to part again for ever if real danger came near them.

They believed in themselves and in each other. Maria had faith in a higher power from which she was to receive strength; Castiglione had little or nothing of this, but he said to himself plainly that if he broke his word he would die for it on the same day, and he loved mere life enough to think the forfeit a heavy one.

They counted upon themselves and upon each other. There was nothing to suggest that quite external circumstances might influence their lives to make the task easier or more difficult than they anticipated. Most certainly neither believed that there could be moments ahead which would be harder to bear than those through which they had already lived.

When Castiglione went away that afternoon they had agreed that he should come again on the next day but one, and once again before he went back to Milan, and that he should at once take steps to exchange into the Piedmont Lancers, if possible, as his old regiment was likely to remain in Rome fully eighteen months longer.