She could not have told why she
felt it, and that made it worse. Her eyes had the indescribable look
that one sees in those of a beautiful sick animal, the painful
expression of an unintelligent suffering which the creature cannot
understand. Regina, roused to act and face to face with danger, was
brave, clever, and quick, but under the mysterious oppression of her
forebodings she was the Roman hill woman, apathetic, hopeless,
unconsciously fatalistic and sleepily miserable.

"What is the matter?" Marcello asked. "What has happened?"

"I shall know when you have told me," Regina answered, slowly shaking
her head; and again she looked down at her hands.

"What I have come to tell you will not make you sad," Marcello replied.

"Speak, heart of my heart. I listen."

Marcello leaned forward and laid his hand upon hers. She looked up
quietly, for it was a familiar action of his.

"I am going to marry you," he said, watching her, and speaking
earnestly.

She kept her eyes on his, but she shook her head again, slowly, from
side to side, and her lips were pressed together.

"Yes, I am," said Marcello, with a little pressure of his hand to
emphasise the words.

But she withdrew hers, and leaned far back from him.

"Never," she said. "I have told you so, many times."

"Not if I tell you that nothing else will make me happy?" he asked.

"If I still made you happy, you would not talk of marriage," Regina
answered.

For the first time since she had loved him he heard a ring of bitterness
in her voice. They had reached that first node of misunderstanding in
the love relations of men and women, which lies where the one begins to
think and act upon a principle while the other still feels and acts from
the heart.

"That is not reasonable," Marcello said.

"It is truth," she answered.

"But how?"

"How! I feel it, here!"

Her hands sprang to life and pressed her bosom, her voice rang deep and
her eyes flashed, as if she were impatient of his misunderstanding.

He tried to laugh gently.

"But if I want to marry you, it is because I mean never to part from
you," he said.

"No!" she cried. "It is because you are afraid that you will leave me,
unless you are bound to me."

"Regina!" Marcello protested, by his tone.

"It is as I say. It is because you are honourable. It is because you
wish to be faithful. It is because you want to be true. But what do I
care for honour, or faith, or truth, if I can only have th