them!’ she whispered.  Count Branciani started.  Now he understood what she had done, and why she had done it.  ’Ask for the charge that makes me a prisoner,’ he said.  Her husband’s noble face gave her a chill of alarm.  The Austrian spoke.  ’He is accused of being the chief of the Sequin Club.’  And then the Countess looked at her husband; she sank at his feet.  My heart breaks.  Wilfrid!  Wilfrid!  You will not wear that uniform?  Say ‘Never, never!’ You will not go to the Austrian army—­Wilfrid?  Would you be my enemy?  Brutes, knee-deep in blood! with bloody fingers!  Ogres!  Would you be one of them?  To see me turn my head shivering with loathing as you pass?  This is why I sent for you, because I loved you, to entreat you, Wilfrid, from my soul, not to blacken the dear happy days when I knew you!  Will you hear me?  That woman is changeing you—­doing all this.  Resist her!  Think of me in this one thing!  Promise it, and I will go at once, and want no more.  I will swear never to trouble you.  Oh, Wilfrid it’s not so much our being enemies, but what you become, I think of.  If I say to myself, ’He also, who was once my lover—­Oh! paid murderer of my dear people!’”

Emilia threw up both hands to her eyes:  but Wilfrid, all on fire with a word, made one of her hands his own, repeating eagerly:  “Once? once?”

“Once?” she echoed him.

“‘Once my love?’” said he.  “Not now?—­does it mean, ‘not now?’ My darling!—­pardon me, I must say it.  My beloved! you said:  ’He who was once my lover:’—­you said that.  What does it mean?  Not that—­not—? does it mean, all’s over?  Why did you bring me here?  You know I must love you forever.  Speak!  ‘Once?’”

“‘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.”