“You ask me more than I can tell you,” I answered, almost roughly.  “Do you thank God, Madonna, that it was so, and never plague your mind to learn the ‘why’ of it.”

She looked at me with eyes that were singularly luminous.

“But I must know,” she insisted.  “Have I not the right?  Tell me now:  Was it that you wished to see my face again before they gave me over to the grave?”

“Perhaps it was that, Madonna,” I answered in confusion, avoiding her glance.  Then—­“Shall we be going?” I suggested fiercely.  But she never heeded that suggestion.

She spoke as if she had not heard, and the words she uttered seemed to turn me into stone.

“Did you love me then so much, dear Lazzaro?”

I swung round to face her now, and I know that my face was white—­whiter than hers had been when I had beheld her in her coffin.  My eyes seemed to burn in their sockets as they met hers.  A madness overtook me and whelmed my better judgment.  I had undergone so much that day through grief, and that night through a hundred emotions, that I was no longer fully master of myself.  Her words robbed me, I think, of my last lingering shred of reason.

“Love you, Madonna?” I echoed, in a voice that was as unlike my own as was the mood that then possessed me.  “You are the air I breathe, the sun that lights my miserable world.  You are dearer to me than honour, sweeter than life.  You are the guardian angel of my existence, the saint to whom I have turned morning and evening in my prayers for grace.  Do I love you, Madonna—?”

And there I paused.  The thought of what I did and what the consequences must be rushed suddenly upon me.  I shivered as a man shivers in awaking.  I dropped on my knees before her, bowing my head and flinging wide my arms.

“Forgive, Madonna,” I cried entreatingly.  “Forgive and forget.  Never again will I offend.”

“Neither forgive nor forget will I,” came her voice, charged with an ineffable sweetness, and her hands descended on my bowed bead, as if she would bless and soothe me.  “I am conscious of no offence that craves forgiveness, and what you have said I would not forget if I could.  Whence springs this fear of yours, dear Lazzaro?  Am I more than woman, or you less than man that you should tremble for the confession that in a wild moment I have dragged from you?  For that wild moment I shall be thankful to my life’s end; for your words have been the sweetest ever my poor ears listened to.  Once I thought that I loved the Lord Giovanni Sforza.  But it was you I loved; for the deeds that earned him my affection were deeds of yours and not of his.  Once I told you so in scorn.  Yet since then I have come soberly to ponder it.  I account you, Lazzaro, the noblest friend, the bravest gentleman and the truest lover that the world has known.  Need it surprise you, then, that I love you and that mine would be a happy life if I might spend it in growing worthy of this noble love of yours?”