The impetuous words coursed rapidly from his lips, and his deep musical voice had a defiant ring as it fell on the stillness of the evening air.  I smiled bitterly as I heard!  She struggled in his arms half angrily.

“Let me go,” she said.  “You are rough, you hurt me!”

He released her instantly.  The violence of his embrace had crushed the rose she wore, and its crimson leaves fluttered slowly down one by one on the ground at her feet.  Her eyes flashed resentfully, and an impatient frown contracted her fair level brows.  She looked away from him in silence, the silence of a cold disdain.  Something in her attitude pained him, for he sprung forward and caught her hand, covering it with kisses.

“Forgive me, carina mia” he cried, repentantly.  “I did not mean to reproach you.  You cannot help being beautiful—­it is the fault of God or the devil that you are so, and that your beauty maddens me!  You are the heart of my heart, the soul of my soul!  Oh, Nina mia, let us not waste words in useless anger.  Think of it, we are free—­ free!  Free to make life a long dream of delight—­delight more perfect than angels can know!  The greatest blessing that could have befallen us is the death of Fabio, and now that we are all in all to each other, do not harden yourself against me!  Nina, be gentle with me—­of all things in the world, surely love is best!”

She smiled, with the pretty superior smile of a young empress pardoning a recreant subject, and suffered him to draw her again, but with more gentleness, into his embrace.  She put up her lips to meet his—­I looked on like a man in a dream!  I saw them cling together—­each kiss they exchanged was a fresh stab to my tortured soul.

“You are so foolish, Guido mio” she pouted, passing her little jeweled fingers through his clustering hair with a light caress—­“so impetuous—­so jealous!  I have told you over and over again that I love you!  Do you not remember that night when Fabio sat out on the balcony reading his Plato, poor fellow!”—­here she laughed musically—­“and we were trying over some songs in the drawing—­room--did I not say then that I loved you best of any one in the world?  You know I did!  You ought to be satisfied!”

Guido smiled, and stroked her shining golden curls.

“I am satisfied,” he said, without any trace of his former heated impatience—­“perfectly satisfied.  But do not expect to find love without jealousy.  Fabio was never jealous—­I know—­he trusted you too implicitly—­he was nothing of a lover, believe me!  He thought more of himself than of you.  A man who will go away for days at a time on solitary yachting and rambling excursions, leaving his wife to her own devices—­a man who reads Plato in preference to looking after her, decides his own fate, and deserves to be ranked with those so-called wise but most ignorant philosophers to whom Woman has always remained an unguessed riddle.  As for me—­I am jealous of the ground you tread upon—­of the air that touches you—­I was jealous of Fabio while he lived—­and—­by heaven!”—­his eyes darkened with a somber wrath—­“if any other man dared now to dispute your love with me I would not rest till his body had served my sword as a sheath!”