On that day Marietta felt once more the full belief that Zorzi loved her; but the certainty did not fill her with happiness as on that first afternoon when she had seen him stoop to pick up the rose she had dropped.  The time that had seemed so very distant had come indeed; instead of years, a week had scarcely passed, and it was not by letting a flower fall in his path that she had told him her love, as she had meant to do.  She had done much more.  She had let him take her hand and press it to his heart, and she would have left it there if Nella had not passed the window; she had wished him to take it, she had let it hang by her side in the hope that he would be bold enough to do so, and she had thrilled with delight at his touch; she had drawn back her hand when the woman came, and she had put on a look of innocent indifference that would have deceived one of the Council’s own spies.  Could any language have been more plain?

It was very strange, she thought, that she should all at once have gone so far, that she should have felt such undreamt joy at the moment and then, when it was hers, a part of her life which nothing could ever undo nor take from her, it was stranger still that the remembrance of this wonderful joy should make her suddenly sad and thoughtful, that she should lie awake at night, wishing that it had never been, and tormenting herself with the idea that she had done an almost irretrievable wrong.  At the very moment when the coming day was breaking upon her heart’s twilight, a wall of darkness arose between her and the future.

Much that is very good and true in the world is built upon the fanciful fears of evil that warn girls’ hearts of harm.  There are dangers that cannot be exaggerated, because the value of what they threaten cannot be reckoned too great, so long as human goodness rests on the dangerous quicksands of human nature.

Marietta had not realised what it meant to be betrothed to Jacopo Contarini, until she had let her hand linger in Zorzi’s.  But after that, one hour had not passed before she felt that she was living between two alternatives that seemed almost equally terrible, and of which she must choose the one or the other within two months.  She must either marry Contarini and never see Zorzi again, or she must refuse to be married and face the tremendous consequences of her unheard-of wilfulness, her father’s anger, the just resentment of all the Contarini family, the humiliation which her brothers would heap upon her, because, in the code of those days, she would have brought shame on them and theirs.  In those times such results were very real and inevitable when a girl’s formal promise of marriage was broken, though she herself might never have been consulted.

It was no wonder that Marietta was sleepless at night, and spent long hours of the day sitting listless by her window without so much as threading a score of beads from the little basket that stood beside her.  Nella came and went often, looked at her, and shook her head with a wise smile.