n intense throe
of the dusk" she started up--she "dared to say," in her dying speech,
that she was divinely pushed out on the terrace--and there he waited
her, with the same silent and solemn face, "at watch to save me."

+ + + + +

He had come, as he defiantly had said, and not the husband met him, but,
at the window, with a lamp in her hand, "Our Lady of all the Sorrows."
He knelt, but even as he knelt she vanished, only to reappear on the
terrace, so close above him that she could almost touch his head if she
bent down--"and she did bend, while I stood still as stone, all eye, all
ear."

First she told him that she could neither read nor write, but that the
letters said to be from him had been read to her, and seemed to say that
he loved her. She did not believe that he meant that as Margherita meant
it; but "good true love would help me now so much" that at last she had
resolved to see him. Her whole life was so strange that this but
belonged to the rest: that an utter stranger should be able to help
her--he, and he alone! She told him her story. There was a reason now at
last why she must fly from "this fell house of hate," and she would take
from Caponsacchi's love what she needed: enough to save her life with--

". . . Take me to Rome!
Take me as you would take a dog, I think,
Masterless left for strangers to maltreat:
Take me home like that--leave me in the house
Where the father and mother are" . . .

She tells his answer thus:

"He replied--
The first word I heard ever from his lips,
All himself in it--an eternity
Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth
O' the soul that then broke silence--'I am yours.'"

* * * * *

But when he had left her, irresolution swept over him. First, the Church
seemed to rebuke--the Church who had smiled on his silly intrigues! Now
she changed her tone, it appeared:--

"Now, when I found out first that life and death
Are means to an end, that passion uses both,
Indisputably mistress of the man
Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice."

But that soon passed: the word was God's; this was the true
self-sacrifice. . . . But might it not injure her--scandal would hiss
about her name. Would not God choose His own way to save her? And _he_
might pray. . . . Two days passed thus. But he must go t