I did it. Your sadness cuts my heart, because I did it.
I--I alone. But for me, you would be free."

"Would to Heaven!" exclaimed the artist, almost under his breath. "But I
will not have you say that it is your fault!" he cried, stopping before
her. "I was the fool that believed. A man of my age--oh, a serious
man--to marry a child! I should have known. At first, I do not say. I
was the first. She thought she had paradise in her arms. A husband! They
all want it, the husband. But I, who had lived and seen, I should have
known. Fool, fool! Ignorant fool!"

The words came out vehemently in the strong dialect, and the nervous,
heart-wrung man struck his breast with his clenched fist, and his eyes
looked upward.

"Reanda, Reanda! What are you saying? When I tell you that I made you
marry her! It was here,--I was in this very chair,--and I told you about
her. And I asked her here with intention, that you might see how
beautiful she was. And then, neither one nor two, she fell in love with
you! It would have been a miracle if you had not married her. And her
father, he was satisfied. May that day be accursed when I brought them
here to torment you!"

She spoke excitedly, and her lip quivered. He began to walk again with
rapid, uncertain strides.

"For that--yes!" he said. "Let the day bear the blame. But I was the
madman. Who leaves the old way and follows the new knows what he leaves,
but not what he may find. I might have been contented. I was so happy!
God knows how happy I was!"

"And I!" exclaimed Francesca, involuntarily; but he did not hear her.

She felt a curious sense of elation, though she was so truly sorry for
him, and it disturbed her strangely. She looked at him and smiled, and
then wondered why the smile came. There is a ruthless cruelty in the
half-unconscious impulses of the purest innocence, of which vice itself
might be ashamed in its heart. It is simple humanity's assertion of its
prior right to be happy. She smiled spontaneously because she knew that
Reanda no longer loved Gloria, and she felt that he could not love her
again; and for a while she was too simply natural to quarrel with
herself for it, or to realize what it meant.

He was nervous, melancholy, and unstrung, and he began to talk about
himself and his married life for the first time, pouring out his
sufferings and thoughtless of what Francesca might think and feel. He,
too, was natural. Unlike his wife, he detested emotion. To be an