I love you, there aren't any sacrifices," said
Amaldi.

"Ah, don't talk that way!" she urged. "As if I didn't know what it all
means to you...."

"I doubt if you know what _you_ mean to me ... quite," he answered.

The smothered passion and sorrow in his voice shook her to the heart.
She tried to speak, and began to cry.

"Forgive me ... forgive me!" she sobbed. "I used to be so proud of not
crying. It's the tragedy of it all.... Our love is such a tragedy!..."

Amaldi looked at her a moment, his face set. Then with a quick, almost
violent, gesture he took her in his arms. "You shall not say that our
love is a tragedy...." he muttered. But she sobbed on:

"It is ... it is!... Oh, why couldn't we have known each other ... from
the first!..."

"But you love me ... now?"

"Oh, you know it ... you know it!..."

He put his hand up suddenly and turned her face to his. It gave him a
strange thrill to feel her warm tears on his hand. He looked down into
her eyes, and there was something imperious and fateful in this look.

".... _Really_ love me?" he said.

Her "Yes" came in a whisper.

He kept his eyes on hers another second, then bent his mouth almost
deliberately to hers.

".... _Sei mia moglie_ ... _sei la mia vera moglie_...." (Thou art my
wife ... thou art my real wife....), he kept whispering brokenly after
that deep kiss. She clung to him in silence. Yes, she too felt that she
belonged to him as she had never belonged to another; yet, to her, this
was the supreme tragedy. With her heart at home on his--with all herself
at home in him--she knew at last the love in which flesh and spirit are
one essence--in which God the fire and God the fuel are one. But to know
such love only after having passed through the nether fires of other
loves--was not that the tragedy of tragedies? She would not have been
true woman had she not felt it so, and he would not have been true man
if, even in that hour, the memory of those other loves had not wrung
him. But while it was the woman's way to confess this sense of tragedy,
it was the man's way to deny it stoutly. So he told her over and over
with passionate insistence that she had never known real love--that the
great fire of his love would consume even the memory of her
mistakes--that the past was nothing to him and should be nothing to her
in the light of the present.

They sat there, locked in each other's arms for a long time. The sun was
westering. The shadows of t