“Let me watch to-night.  There is no danger.  You are racked by sleeplessness, and phantoms born of it wear the face of truth to you.  We are safe; we are in Italy.  The stars tell me so.  Let me watch to-night.”  And at once she was startled.  He withdrew his arm so roughly that it seemed he flung off his hand; he spoke in a voice so hoarse and rough she did not know it for his.  And indeed it was a different man who now confronted her,—­a man different from the dutiful servant who had rescued her, different even from the man who had held her so tenderly in his arms on the road to Ala.

“Go to your room,” said he.  “You must not stay here.”

She stepped back in her surprise and faced him.

“Every minute,” he cried in a sort of exasperation, “I bid myself remember the great gulf between you and me; every minute you forget it.  I make a curtain of your rank, your title, and—­let us be frank—­your destiny; I hang the curtain up between us, and with a gentle hand you tear it down.  At the end of it all I am flesh and blood.  Why did I sit the whole long dreary day out on the bank by the roadside there?  To watch?  I could not describe to you one traveller out of them all who passed.  Why, then?  Ask yourself!  It was not that I might stand by your side afterwards in the glamour of an Italian night with the stars pulsing overhead like a smile upon your lips, and all the world whispering!  You must not stay here!”

His eyes burnt upon her; his hands shook; from head to foot he was hot and fierce with passion, and in spite of herself she kindled to it.  That he loved she knew before, but his description of his city of dreams had given to him in her thoughts a touch of fancifulness, had led her to conceive of his love as something dreamlike, had somehow spiritualised him to the hindrance of her grasp of him as flesh and blood.  Thus, she understood, she might well have seemed to be trifling with him, though nothing was further from her thoughts.  But now he was dangerous; love had made him dangerous, and to her.  She knew it, and in spite of herself she gloried in the knowledge.  Her heart leaped into her eyes and shone there responsive, unafraid.  The next moment she lowered her head.  But he had seen the unmistakable look in her eyes.  Even as she stood with her bowed head, he could not but feel that every fibre in her body thrilled; he could not but know the transfigured expression of her face.

“I had no thought to hurt you,” she said, and her voice trembled, and it was not with fear or any pain.  Wogan took a step towards her and checked himself.  He spoke sharply between clenched teeth.

“Lock your door,” said he.

The curtain between them was down.  Wogan had patched and patched it before; but it was torn down now, and they had seen each other without so much as that patched semblance of a screen to veil their eyes.  Clementina did not answer him or raise her head.  She went quietly into her room.  Wogan did not move until she had locked the door.