“Forgive me!” he said simply.  “I was wrong!”

Sylvie, easily moved to kindness, was touched by this apparent humility on the part of a man so renowned for unflinching hauteur, and she at once gave him her hand.

“I shall forget your words!” she said gently.  “So there is nothing to pardon.”

“Thank you for your generosity,” he said, still standing before her and preserving his grave and quiet demeanour.  “In my zeal for Holy Church, my tongue frequently outruns my prudence.  I confess you have hurt me,—­cruelly!  You are a mere child to me—­young, beautiful, beloved,—­and I am growing old; I have sacrificed all the joys of life for the better serving of the faith—­but I have kept a few fair dreams—­and one of the fairest was my belief in you!”

Sylvie looked at him searchingly, but his eyes did not flinch in meeting hers.

“I am sorry you are disappointed, Monsignor,” she began, when he raised his hand deprecatingly.

“No—­I am not disappointed as yet!” he said, with an affectation of great kindness.  “Because I do not permit myself to believe that you will allow me to be disappointed!  Just now you made a passing allusion—­and I venture to say a hasty and unworthy one—­to your ‘bank,’ as if my whole soul were set on retaining you as a daughter of the Church for your great wealth’s sake only!  Contessa, you are mistaken!  Give me credit for higher and nobler motives!  Grant me the right to be a little better—­a little more disinterested, than perhaps popular rumour describes me,—­believe me to be at least your friend—­”

He paused—­his voice apparently broken by emotion, and turning away his head he paced the room once more and finally sat down, covering his eyes with one hand, in an admirably posed attitude of fatigue and sorrow.

Sylvie was perplexed, and somewhat embarrassed.  She had never seen him in this kind of humour before.  She was accustomed to a certain domineering authority in his language, rendered all the more difficult to endure by the sarcasm with which he sometimes embittered his words, as though he had dipped them in gall before pronouncing them,—­but this apparent abandonment of reserve, this almost touching assumption of candour, were phases of his histrionical ability which he had never till now displayed in her presence.

“Monsignor,” she said after a little silence, “I sincerely ask your pardon if I have wronged you, even in a thought!  I had no real intention of doing so, and if anything I have said has seemed to you unduly aggressive or unjust, I am sorry!  But you yourself began to scold”—­and she smiled—­“and I am not in the humour to be scolded!  Though, to speak quite frankly, I have always been more or less prepared for a little trouble on the subject of my intended marriage with Mr. Aubrey Leigh,—­I have felt and known all along that it would incur the Pope’s displeasure . . .”

Here Gherardi uncovered his eyes and looked at her fully.