he consequences of what I do. But I will not spare
you where the results of your action towards me are concerned.

"Don Orsino made love to me last spring. I loved him from the first. I
can hear your cruel laugh and see your contemptuous face as I write. But
the information is necessary, and I can bear your scorn because this is
the last opportunity for such diversion which I shall afford you, and
because I mean that you shall pay dearly for it. I loved Don Orsino, and
I love him still. You, of course, have never loved. You have hated,
however, and perhaps one passion may be the measure of another. It is in
my case, I can assure you, for the better I love, the better I learn to
hate you.

"Last Thursday Don Orsino asked me to be his wife. I had known for some
time that he loved me and I knew that he would speak of it before long.
The day was sultry at first and then there was a thunderstorm. My nerves
were unstrung and I lost my head. I told him that I loved him. That does
not concern you. I told him, also, however, that I had given a solemn
promise to my dying husband, and I had still the strength to say that I
would not marry again. I meant to gain time, I longed to be alone, I
knew that I should yield, but I would not yield blindly. Thank God, I
was strong. I am like you in that, though happily not in any other way.
You ask me why I should even think of yielding. I answer that I love Don
Orsino better than I loved the man you murdered. There is nothing
humiliating in that, and I make the confession without reserve. I love
him better, and therefore, being human, I would have broken my promise
and married him, had marriage been possible. But it is not, as you know.
It is one thing to turn to the priest as he stands by a dying man and to
say, Pronounce us man and wife, and give us a blessing, for the sake of
this man's rest. The priest knew that we were both free, and took the
responsibility upon himself, knowing also that the act could have no
consequences in fact, whatever it might prove to be in theory. It is
quite another matter to be legally married to Don Orsino Saracinesca, in
the face of a strong opposition. But I went home that evening, believing
that it could be done and that the opposition would vanish. I believed
because I loved. I love still, but what I learned that night has killed
my belief in an impossible happiness.

"I need not tell you all that passed between me and Lucrezia Ferris. How
she knew of