"Gran' Dio!" Rivardi started back in utter amazement--"His wife?--That girl? Young, beautiful? She will chain herself to a madman? Surely you will not allow it!"
Morgana looked at him with a smile.
"Poor Giulio!" she said, softly--"You are a most unfortunate descendant of your Roman ancestors as far as we women are concerned! You fall in love with me--and you find I am not for you!--then you see a perfectly lovely woman whom you cannot choose but admire--and a little stray thought comes flying into your head--yes!--quite involuntarily!--that perhaps--only perhaps--her love might come your way! Do not be angry, my friend!--it was only a thought that moved you when you saw her the other day--when I called you to look at her as she recovered consciousness and lay on her bed like a sleeping figure of the loveliest of pagan goddesses! What man could have seen her thus without a thrill of tenderness!--and now you have to hear that all that beauty and warmth of youthful life is to be sacrificed to a stone idol!--(for the man she worships is little more!) ah, yes!--I am sorry for you, Giulio!--but can do nothing to prevent the sacrifice,--indeed, I have promised to assist it!"
Rivardi had alternately flushed and paled while she spoke,--her keen, incisive probing of his most secret fancies puzzled and vexed him,--but with a well-assumed indifference he waved aside her delicately pointed suggestions as though he had scarcely heard them, and said-"You have promised to assist? Can you reconcile it to your conscience to let this girl make herself a prisoner for life?"
"I can!" she answered quietly--"For if she is opposed in her desire for such imprisonment she will kill herself. So it is wisest to let her have her way. The man she loves so desperately may die at any moment, and then she will be free. But meanwhile she will have the consolation of doing all she can for him, and the hope of helping him to recover; vain hope as it may be, there is a divine unselfishness in it. For she says that if he is restored to health she will go away at once and never let him know she is his wife."
Rivardi's handsome face expressed utter incredulity.
"Will she keep her word I wonder?"
"She will!"
"Marvellous woman!" and there was bitterness in his tone--"But women are all amazing when you come to know them! In love? in hate, in good, in evil, in cleverness and in utter stupidity, they are wonderful creatures! And you, amica bella, are perhaps the most wonderful of them all! So kind and yet so cruel!"