the
painful difficulty of his position.

'Well, have you made your choice?' cried she at length, as with a slight
smile she stood in front of him.

'It would be a treachery to my own heart, and to you, too, were I to say
that all this magnificence I see here suggested no thought of evil. We
were poor even to misery once, Marietta--I am still so; and well I know
that in such wretchedness as ours temptation is triply dangerous. To
tell me that you have yielded is, then, no more than to confess you were
like others.'

'Of what, then, do you accuse me? Is it that I am Mirabeau's mistress?
Would that I were!' cried she passionately; 'would that by my devotion
I could share his love and give him all my own! You would cry shame
upon me for this avowal. You think more highly of your own petty
contrivances, your miserable attempts to sustain a mock morality--your
boasted tie of marriage--than of the emotions that are born with you,
that move your infancy, sway your manhood, and temper your old age. You
hold that by such small cheats you supply the insatiable longings of the
human heart. But the age of priestcraft is over; throne, altar, purple,
sceptre, incense and all, have fled; and in the stead of man's mummeries
we have installed Man himself, in the might of his intellect, the
glorious grandeur of his great conceptions, and the noble breadth of his
philanthropy; and who is the type of these, if not Gabriel Riquetti? His
mistress! what have I not done to win the proud name? Have I not striven
hard for it? These triumphs, as they call them, my great successes, had
no other promptings. If my fame as an actress stands highest in Europe,
it was gained but in his cause. Your great Alfieri himself has taught me
no emotions I have not learned in my own deep love; and how shadowy and
weak the poet's words beside the throbbing ecstasies of one true heart!
You ask for a confession: you shall have one. But why do you go? Would
you leave me?'

'Would that we had never met again!' said Gerald sadly. 'Through many a
dark and sad hour have I looked back upon our life, when, as little more
than children, we journeyed days long together. I pictured to myself
how the same teachings that nerved my own heart in trouble must have
supported and sustained yours. If you knew how I used to dwell upon the
memory of that time; its very privations were hallowed in my memory,
telling how through all our little cares and sorrows our love sufficed
us!