“You seek to place me,” he said, “in straits in which, by mine own act, I shall never be.  Loving you as I love you, I could wed no other while you live.”

She paled, but persisted.

“But, if, Hugh? If?”

“Then, no,” he said.  “I should not leave one I had wed.  But——­”

“Hugh,” she said, “thinking you faithless, I took the holy vows which wedded me to Heaven.  How can I leave my heavenly Bridegroom, for love of any man upon this earth?”

“Not ‘any man,’” he answered; “but your betrothed, returned to claim you; the man to whom you said as parting words:  ’Maid or wife, I am all thine own; thine and none other’s forever.’  Ah, that brings the warm blood to thy cheek!  Oh, my Heart’s Life, if it was true then, it is true still!  God is not a man that he should lie, or rob another of his bride.  If I had wed another woman, I should have done that thing, honestly believing thee the wife of another man.  But, all these years, while thou and I were both deceived, He, Who knoweth all, has known the truth.  He knew thee betrothed to me.  He heard thee say, upon the battlements, when last we stood together:  ’God knows, I am all thine own.’  He knew how, when I thought I had lost thee, I yet lived faithful to the pure memory of our love.  The day thy vows were made, He knew that I was free, and thou, therefore, still pledged to me.  Shall a man rob God?  Ay, he may.  But shall God rob a man?  Nay, then, never!”

She trembled, wavered; then fled to the shrine of the Virgin, kneeling with hands outstretched.

“Holy Mother of God,” she sobbed, “teach him that I dare not do this thing!  Shew him that I cannot break my vows.  Help him to understand that I would not, if I could.”

He followed, and kneeled beside her; his proud head bent; his voice breaking with emotion.

“Blessed Virgin,” he said.  “Thou who didst dwell in the earthly home at Nazareth, help this woman of mine to understand, that if she break her troth to me, holding herself from me, now when I am come to claim her, she sends me forth to an empty life, to a hearth beside which no woman will sit, to a home forever desolate.”

Together they knelt, before the tender image of Mother and Child; together, yet apart; he, loyally mindful not so much as to brush against a fold of her veil.

The dark face, and the fair, were lifted, side by side, as they knelt before the Madonna.  For a while so motionless they kneeled, they might have been finely-modelled figures; he, bronze; she, marble.

Then, with a sudden movement, she put out her right hand, and caught his left.

Firmly his fingers closed over hers; but he drew no nearer.

Yet as they knelt thus with clasped hands, his pulsing life seemed to flow through her, undoing, in one wild, sweet moment, the work of years of fast and vigil.

“Ah, Hugh,” she cried, suddenly, “spare me!  Spare me!  Tempt me not!”