“‘Once?’” Emilia was breathing quick, but her voice was well contained:  “Yes, I said ‘once.’  You were then.”

“Till that night in Devon?

“Let it be.”

“But you love me still?”

“We won’t speak of it.”

“I see!  You cannot forgive.  Good heavens!  I think I remember your saying so once—­Once!  Yes, then:  you said it then, during our ‘Once;’ when I little thought you would be merciless to me—­who loved you from the first! the very first!  I love you now!  I wake up in the night, thinking I hear your voice.  You haunt me.  Cruel! cold!—­who guards you and watches over you but the man you now hate?  You sit there as if you could make yourself stone when you pleased.  Did I not chastise that man Pericles publicly because he spoke a single lie of you?  And by that act I have made an enemy to our house who may crush us in ruin.  Do I regret it?  No.  I would do any madness, waste all my blood for you, die for you!”

Emilia’s fingers received a final twist, and were dropped loose.  She let them hang, looking sadly downward.  Melancholy is the most irritating reply to passion, and Wilfrid’s heart waged fierce at the sight of her, grown beautiful!—­grown elegant!—­and to reject him!  When, after a silence which his pride would not suffer him to break, she spoke to ask what Mr. Pericles had said of her, he was enraged, forgot himself, and answered:  “Something disgraceful.”

Deep colour came on Emilia.  “You struck him, Wilfrid?”

“It was a small punishment for his infamous lie, and, whatever might be the consequences, I would do it again.”

“Wilfrid, I have heard what he has said.  Madame Marini has told me.  I wish you had not struck him.  I cannot think of him apart from the days when I had my voice.  I cannot bear to think of your having hurt him.  He was not to blame.  That is, he did not say:  it was not untrue.”

She took a breath to make this last statement, and continued with the same peculiar implicity of distinctness, which a terrific thunder of “What?” from Wilfrid did not overbear:  “I was quite mad that day I went to him.  I think, in my despair I spoke things that may have led him to fancy the truth of what he has said.  On my honour, I do not know.  And I cannot remember what happened after for the week I wandered alone about London.  Mr. Powys found me on a wharf by the river at night.”

A groan burst from Wilfrid.  Emilia’s instinct had divined the antidote that this would be to the poison of revived love in him, and she felt secure, though he had again taken her hand; but it was she who nursed a mere sentiment now, while passion sprang in him, and she was not prepared for the delirium with which he enveloped her.  She listened to his raving senselessly, beginning to think herself lost.  Her tortured hands were kissed; her eyes gazed into.  He interpreted her stupefaction as contrition, her silence as delicacy, her changeing of colour as flying hues of shame:  the partial coldness at their meeting he attributed to the burden on her mind, and muttering in a magnanimous sublimity that he forgave her, he claimed her mouth with force.