and forgiving means
forgetting, doesn't it?"

She answered only by pressing her face more closely against his.

"But there are other things for you to forgive," he went on. "I used to
think I was very strong, not only in my body but in my will. Now I see
that I can be weak. Can you love a man who does things he knows to be
beneath him? I have made a fool of myself in the Casino--a fool like the
rest. I began because I was miserable, but----"

"Was it I who made you miserable?"

"Yes. But that is no excuse for me. I deserved it all and more: I'd hurt
you. And afterward, I went on being a fool, because--it gave me a kind
of pleasure, when I'd lost pleasure in other things. It's the weakness
of it that I hate in myself, not so much the thing I did. A woman should
have a man's strength to lean on, if she is to love him. Weakness is
unpardonable in a man. Yet I'm asking you to forgive it, and let me
begin over again."

"I love you as you are," Mary said. "What am I, to judge? What have I
myself been doing?"

"You are a girl; and you are so young. You knew no better. I knew. You
were led on. I walked into the trap with my eyes open."

"I was warned. My father just before he died wrote me a letter saying
there was 'gambler's blood' in my veins. Those words always run in my
head now. And a friend who loves me begged me not to come to Monte
Carlo."

"It was Fate brought you--to give you to me. Do you regret it?"

"I don't regret anything--if you don't; because what is past--for both
of us--doesn't feel real. This is the only real part. We were brought to
Monte Carlo for this, it seems now."

"It seems, and it is."

They looked with one accord down at the Casino far below, which from the
cure's garden had more than ever the semblance of a large, crouching
animal. Its four horns glittered in the beginning of sunset, as if they
were crusted with jewels of different colours. Its dominance over all
that surrounded it, all that was smaller and less powerful and
impressive than itself, was astonishingly evident from this bird's-eye
point of view; but brightly as the jewels gleamed, they had lost their
allurement for these two. With Vanno's arms around her, Mary wondered
how she could ever have felt that the Casino was a vast magnet
compelling her to come to it in spite of herself, drawing her thoughts
and her money to itself, as an immense magnetic rock might draw the
nails from the sides of a frail little boat. With Mary