that the
question seemed quite natural. I daresay you have seen Guido in your
visions, too, when you believed that you cared for him!"

"Never!" Cecilia could hardly speak just then.

"Poor Guido! that was a natural question too. Since you used to see a
mere acquaintance, like myself, and fancy that you were----"

"Stop!"

"----that you were talking familiarly with him," continued Lamberti
unmoved, "it would hardly be strange that you should often have seen
Guido d'Este in the same way, while you thought you loved him, and it is
stranger that you should not now dream about a man you really love--if
you do!"

"I say that you have no right to talk in this way," said Cecilia.

"I have the right to say a great many things," Lamberti answered. "I
have the right to reproach you----"

"You said that you believed me honest and true."

The words checked his angry mood suddenly. He passed his hand over his
eyes and changed his position.

"I do," he said. "There is no woman alive of whom I believe more good
than I do of you."

"Then trust me a little, and believe, too, that I am suffering quite as
much as Guido. I have agreed to take your advice, to obey you, since it
is that and nothing else----"

"I have no power to give you orders. I wish I had!"

"You have right on your side. That is power, and I obey you. You have
told me what to do, and I shall do it, and be glad to do it. But even
after what I have done, I have some privileges left. I have a secret,
and I am ashamed of it, and it can do no good to Guido to know it, much
less to you. Please let me keep it in my own way."

"Yes. But if you are afraid that I should hurt the man, if I knew his
name, you are mistaken."

"I am not in the least afraid of that," Cecilia answered, and the light
filled her eyes again as she looked at him. "You are too just to hate an
innocent man. It is not his fault that I love him, and he will never
know it. He will never guess that I think him the best, and truest, and
bravest man alive, and that he is all this world to me, now and for
ever!"

She spoke quietly enough, but there was a radiant joy in her face which
Lamberti never forgot. While keeping her secret, she was telling him at
last to his face that she loved him, and it was the first time she had
ever spoken such words out of her dreams. In them indeed they had been
familiar to her lips, as words like them had been to his.

He leaned forward, resting one elbow on his k