You have tried hard to make me love you and you
have succeeded, for I love you very much. So much the worse for me. It
must end now."

"You do not think of me, when you say that."

"Perhaps I think more of you than you know--or will understand. I am
older than you--do not interrupt me! I am older, for a woman is always
older than a man in some things. I know what will happen, what will
certainly happen in time if we do not part. You will grow jealous of a
shadow and I shall never be able to tell you that this same shadow is
not dear to me. You will come to hate what I have loved and love still,
though it does not prevent me from loving you too--"

"But less well," said Orsino rather harshly.

"You would believe that, at least, and the thought would always be
between us."

"If you loved me as much, you would not hesitate. You would marry me
living, as you married him dead."

"If there were no other reason against it--" She stopped.

"There is no other reason," said Orsino insisting.

Maria Consuelo shook her head but said nothing and a long silence
followed. Orsino sat still, watching her and wondering what was passing
in her mind. It seemed to him, and perhaps rightly, that if she were
really in earnest and loved him with all her heart, the reasons she gave
for a separation were far from sufficient. He had not even much faith in
her present obstinacy and he did not believe that she would really go
away. It was incredible that any woman could be so capricious as she
chose to be. Her calmness, or what appeared to him her calmness, made it
even less probable, he thought, that she meant to part from him. But the
thought alone was enough to disturb him seriously. He had suffered a
severe shock with outward composure but not without inward suffering,
followed naturally enough by something like angry resentment. As he
viewed the situation, Maria Consuelo had alternately drawn him on and
disappointed him from the very beginning; she had taken delight in
forcing him to speak out his love, only to chill him the next moment, or
the next day, with the certainty that she did not love him sincerely.
Just then he would have preferred not to put into words the thoughts of
her that crossed his mind. They would have expressed a disbelief in her
character which he did not really feel and an opinion of his own
judgment which he would rather not have accepted.

He even went so far, in his anger, as to imagine what would happen if