n! Who means to take your life?"

--a new mood seizes on him. They have "one thing to guard against." They
must not make much of one another; there must be no more parade of love
than there was yesterday; for then it would seem as if he supposed she
needed proofs that he loves her--

". . . yes, still love you, love you,
In spite of Luca and what's come to him."

That would be a sure sign that Luca's "white sneering old reproachful
face" was ever in their thoughts. Yes; they must even quarrel at times,
as if they

". . . still could lose each other, were not tied
By this . . ."

but on her responding cry of "Love!" he shudders back again: _Is_ he so
surely for ever hers?

She, in her stubborn patience, answers by a reminiscence of their early
days of love--

". . . That May morning we two stole
Under the green ascent of sycamores"

--and, thinking to reason with him, asks if, that morning, they had

". . . come upon a thing like that,
Suddenly--"

but he interrupts with his old demand for the true word: she shall not
say "a thing" . . . and at last that marvellous patience gives way, and
in a superb flash of ironic rage she answers him--

"Then, Venus' body! had we come upon
My husband Luca Gaddi's murdered corpse
Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close"

--flinging him the "words" he has whimpered for in full measure, that so
at last she may attain to asking if, that morning, he would have "pored
upon it?" She knows he would not; then why pore upon it now? For him,
it is here, as much as in the deserted house; it is everywhere.

". . . For me

(she goes on),

Now he is dead, I hate him worse: I hate . . .
Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold
His two dead hands, and say, 'I hate you worse,
Luca, than----'"

And in her frenzy of reminiscent hatred and loathing for the murdered
man, she goes to Sebald and takes _his_ hands, as if to feign that other
taking.

With the hysteria that has all along been growing in him, Sebald flings
her back--

". . . Take your hands off mine;
'Tis the hot evening--off! oh, morning, is it?"

--and she, restored to her cooler state by this repulse, and with a
perhaps unconscious moving to some revenge for it, points out, with a
profounder depth of callousness than she has yet displayed, that the
body at the house will have to be tak