“But why should you heed the outer noises?  You have never done so before.”

“Perhaps I was wrong not to do so before.  Perhaps I should have listened sooner.  Perhaps others have seen—­understood—­sooner than I—­oh, the thought is intolerable!”

She moved a pace or two away, and then, regaining the mastery of her lips and eyes, turned to him with a show of calmness.

“Your heart was never in this charter—­” she began.

“Fulvia!” he cried protestingly; but she lifted a silencing hand.  “Ah, I have seen it—­I have felt it—­but I was never willing to own that you were right.  My pride in you blinded me, I suppose.  I could not bear to dream any fate for you but the greatest.  I saw you always leading events, rather than waiting on them.  But true greatness lies in the man, not in his actions.  Compromise, delay, renunciation—­these may be as heroic as conflict.  A woman’s vision is so narrow that I did not see this at first.  You have always told me that I looked only at one side of the question; but I see the other side now—­I see that you were right.”

Odo stood silent.  He had followed her with growing wonder.  A volte-face so little in keeping with her mental habits immediately struck him as a feint; yet so strangely did it accord with his own secret reluctances that these inclined him to let it pass unquestioned.

Some instinctive loyalty to his past checked the temptation.  “I am not sure that I understand you,” he said slowly.  “Have you lost faith in the ideas we have worked for?”

She hesitated, and he saw the struggle beneath her surface calmness.  “No, no,” she exclaimed quickly, “I have not lost faith in them—­”

“In me, then?”

She smiled with a disarming sadness.  “That would be so much simpler!” she murmured.

“What do you mean, then?” he urged.  “We must understand each other.”  He paused, and measured his words out slowly.  “Do you think it a mistake to proclaim the constitution tomorrow?”

Again her face was full of shadowy contradictions.  “I entreat you not to proclaim it tomorrow,” she said in a low voice.

Odo felt the blood drum in his ears.  Was not this the word for which he had waited?  But still some deeper instinct held him back, warning him, as it seemed, that to fall below his purpose at such a juncture was the only measurable failure.  He must know more before he yielded, see deeper into her heart and his; and each moment brought the clearer conviction that there was more to know and see.

“This is unlike you, Fulvia,” he said.  “You cannot make such a request on impulse.  You must have a reason.”

She smiled.  “You told me once that a woman’s reasons are only impulses in men’s clothes.”

But he was not to be diverted by this thrust.  “I shall think so now,” he said, “unless you can give me some better account of yours!”

She was silent, and he pressed on with a persistency for which he himself could hardly account:  “You must have a reason for this request.”