terrible indeed!" he cried out in his distress; whereupon Selvaggia
forgot to be ashamed any more, she was so taken by surprise.

"What do you mean, Cino?" she began to falter. "I don't understand you."

Cino plunged into the icy pool of explanation, and splashed there at
large. "I mean, I mean"--he waved his hands in the air--"it is most
difficult to explain. We must apprehend Love aright--if we can. He is a
grim and dreadful lord, it appears, working out the salvation of the
souls of poets, and other men, by great sufferings. There is no other
way, as the books teach us. Such love is always towards ladies; the
suffering is from them, the love for them. They deal the darts, and
receive the more devotion. It is not to be otherwise--could not
be--there can be no poetry without pain; and how can there be pain if
the lady loves the poet? Ah, no, it is impossible! Anciently, very long
ago, in the times of Troy, maybe, it was different. I know not what to
say; I had never expected, never looked, nor even asked--ah, Madonna,"
he suddenly cried, and found himself upon his knees, "what am I to say
to you for this speech of yours?"

Selvaggia, white enough now, froze hard. "Do you mean," she said slowly,
in words that fell one by one, like cuts from a deliberate whip, "do you
mean that you do not love me, Messer Cino, after all?"

"You are a light to my eyes and a lantern to my feet," Cino murmured:
but she did not seem to hear.

"Do you mean," she went on, "that you are not prepared to be--to be
my--my betrothed?"

It was done: now let the heavens fall! She could not ask the man to
marry her, but it came to the same thing; she had practically committed
that unpardonable sin; she had approached love to wedlock, a mystery to
a bargain, the rapt converse of souls in heaven to a wrangle over the
heeltaps in a tavern parlour. She was a heretic whom any Court of Love
must excommunicate. The thing was so serious that it brought Cino to his
feet, severe, formal, an Assessor of Civil Causes. He spread out his
hands as if to wave aside words he should never have heard. He had found
his tongue, for he was now contemplating the Abstract.

"Be very sure, most sacred Lady," said he, "that no bodily torment could
drive me to such sacrilege as your noble humility leads you to
contemplate. No indeed! Wretchedly unworthy as I am to live in the light
of your eyes, I am not yet fallen so far. There are yet seeds of grace
within me--of your