of our good Sicilian
people. He was very kind to me, and I was inconsolable."

"Ah. You are still in mourning for him?"

She turned her hands over, showing empty palms. "I loved him so much
that I could not think of marrying another man in Siracusa. At length my
mother and father decided to send me to live with my uncle in the hope
that I could forget Alessandro enough to consider marrying again."

"Do you wish to marry again?"

"I have met no one I am drawn to but you, Simon, and marriage between
you and me would be unthinkable. My family's station is so far beneath
yours."

His heart leapt happily. She was free, yet, as she said, not wholly
innocent. He need not feel quite so guilty about the passionate thoughts
he had been having about her. And as for marriage between them being
unthinkable, she did not know that none of the great houses of France
would consider a daughter of theirs taking the name de Gobignon. Her
nonclerical family might be of low station, just as the pope's father
had been a shoemaker, but Sophia was the niece of a cardinal, a prince
of the Church.

It was love, not thoughts of marriage, that had brought him here
tonight. Still, he must respect her honorable widowhood. Since she had
loved her husband, she might be more susceptible to him, and he must
guard her virtue all the more steadfastly. Perhaps she thought that he
respected her less as a widow. He must reassure her.

She was not holding him any longer. He could stand up without tearing
himself away from her. He sprang to his feet and strode to the center of
the room.

"Believe me, I think you just as pure as if you had never been married
at all."

She looked up at him, surprised, her hands still folded in her lap, her
dark eyes wide.

"I am delighted to hear that. But"--she cast her eyes down and smiled
faintly--"does that mean there is to be nothing at all between us?"

"I love you!" Simon declared. "I will always love you. I think of you
night and day. I beg you to love me in return."

"Oh, Simon. How beautiful." She held out her arms to him. But he stayed
where he was and raised his hands warningly.

"I mean to love you according to the commandments of l'amour courtois.
With every fiber of my being I yearn to be altogether yours, but you
must restrain me."

"I must?"

"You must be what the poets of old Languedoc called 'mi dons'--my lord.
You must rule me. One day we will join together in body, but only after
I have