“Is it true?  Really true?”

“So may God help me, it is quite true.  But if I had thought it was not for himself—­”

“Oh, yes, it was,” Regina answered.  “It was, and it is, to the end.  Will you see?  I will show you.  For what the eyes see the heart believes more easily.  Signorina, will you bring the little box covered with old velvet?  It is there, on the table, and it is open.”

Aurora rose, humouring her, and brought the thing she asked for, and sat down again, setting it on the edge of the bed.  Regina turned her head to see it, and raised the lid with one hand.

“This is my little box,” she said.  “What he has given me is all in it.  I have no other.  Will you see?  Here is what I have taken from him.  You shall look everywhere, if you do not believe.”

“But I do believe you!” Aurora cried, feeling that tears were coming to her eyes.

“But you must see,” Regina insisted.  “Or perhaps when I am gone you will say to yourself, ’There may have been diamonds and pearls in the little box, after all!’ You shall know that it was all for himself.”

To please her Aurora took up some of the simple trinkets, simpler and cheaper even than what she had herself.

“There are dresses, yes, many more than I wanted.  But I could not let him be ashamed of me when we went out together, and travelled.  Do you forgive me the dresses, Signorina?  I wore them to please him.  Please forgive me that also!”

Aurora dropped the things into the open box and laid both her hands on Regina’s, bending down her radiant head and looking very earnestly into the anxious eyes.

“Forgiveness is not all from me to you, Regina,” she said.  “I want yours too.”

“Mine?” The eyes grew wide and wondering.

“Don’t you see that but for me he would have married you, and that I have been the cause of a great wrong to you?”

For one instant Regina’s face darkened, her brows straightened themselves, and her lip curled.  She remembered how, only two days ago, in the very next room, Marcello had insisted that she should he his wife.  But as she looked into Aurora’s innocent eyes she understood, and the cloud passed from her own, and the bright smile came back.  Aurora had spoken in the simplicity of her true heart, sure that it was only the memory of his love for her that had withheld Marcello from first to last; and Regina well knew that it had always been present with him, in spite of his brave struggle to put it away.  That memory of another, which Regina had seen slowly reviving in him, had been for something in her refusal to marry him.

With the mysterious sure vision of those who are near death, she felt that it would hurt Aurora to know the truth, except from Marcello himself.

“If you have ever stood between us,” she said, “you had the right.  He loved you first.  There is nothing to forgive in that.  Afterwards he loved me a little.  No one can take that from me, no one!  It is mine, and it is all I have, and though I am going, and though I know that he is tired of me, it is still more than the world.  To have it, as I have it, I would do again what I did, from the first.”