And you, who were my one professed friend, the one man who spoke so loudly of dying in my service, you falsified my vision, you masked him--either at his own and at my brother's bidding, or else out of the malignancy of your nature--in a garb that should render him agreeable in my eyes.

Do you realise what you have done?
Does not your conscience tell you?
You have contrived that I have plighted my troth to a man such as I believed the Lord Giovanni to be.

Mother of Mercy!" she ended, with a scorn ineffable; "when I dwell upon it now, it almost seems that it was to you I gave my heart, for yours were the deeds that earned my regard--not his." Such was the very argument that I had hugged to my starving soul, at the time the things she spoke of had befallen, and it had consoled me as naught in life could have consoled me.

Yet now that she employed it with such a scornful emphasis as to make me realise how far beneath her I really was, how immeasurably beyond my reach was she, it was as much consolation to me as confession without absolution may be to the perishing sinner.

I answered nothing.