“You mistake!” he said dryly.

“And you, if you think that those fops at the marchioness’ were not tricked and fooled by me! even the cheat who induced me to leave my home—­you see, I am frank—­he was my dupe, and I saw all the time his inferiority to the husband whom I quitted.  In that case, it was a fortune that tempted me, for you know how pressed we were!  But when alone, sobered—­horrified by the warning conveyed in the sudden death of that man, I valued you correctly, and saw that I loved you above all men.  I was subjected to the power of goodness and loving which is enthroned in you.  All of a sudden, as you fell in love, I adored you, and if only you could have been kept in ignorance of what I did, there would have been no wife more faithful, devoted, submissive and loving than your own Cesarine.”

“Did I not forgive you when I learned of your faults?” he reproached her.

“True, you pardoned me,” she answered, “but loftily, as one at a distance, shaking me off and regaining possession of yourself.  In short, ceasing to be a man.  You led me to see that you would no longer believe me, because I had once told a lie.  Your behavior was grand, noble and lofty, for any other man would have whipped me out of his house like a cur; and yet I ought not to have been treated so.”

“How? like a daughter of the Vieradlers—­though you are probably not one?”

“You should have abused me, trampled me under foot, even—­but then forgiven me like an erring man.  I am earthly—­worldly—­and I do not understand grand sentiments and half-forgiveness.”

There was some sense in her argument, but arguments would not have any effect on a character like his, which losing esteem once, was not to be deceived again.  He had not required Hedwig’s revelation about the web of treachery spun around him to be invulnerable to the pleading one.  Her murder of her infant had ruined her irredeemably.  Over it he had shed tears, though it was more in her image than his and, she had offered no one!

“Are we women more angelic than you men,” she exclaimed the more feverishly, as she felt she was not gaining ground and that over the crumbling edge of which she vaguely hoped to climb, he would not stretch a hand in help.  “Are faults, errors and failures your privilege, as force is?  Did I really care for any of those men?  Do I even recall one of them?  It was only in rage and spite against your coldness that I went over to the marchioness.  I ran to these flirtations to forget, as I would have taken morphine to sleep.  But I have not forgotten you, and I have not slept off my love for you, and this is the truth!”

He made an impatient gesture.