sin. I know its crime, and yet I love its sovereignty still. I am vile enough to feel the charm of its power, while I have conscience enough to abhor its work."
The thoughts floated through her mind where she stood, looking over to where the sea lay, the dark outline of some felucca alone gliding spirit-like across the moonlit surface.
The last words of the man who had left her seemed to echo still upon the air; the summons of conscience, the reproach of the past, the duty and the demand of the present, all were spoken in them. Even as he had uttered them, she had thought of one whose fate would be the same with this which now upbraided her, and pleaded with her. She knew that he should be spared. It might not be too late to save him—to save him from herself.
He who had left her to go out and find a soldier's death on the blood-soaked plains of Lombardy, stood between her and the other life which she had once saved from such a grave, and which now was in the first flush of faith that held her rather angel than woman, and of love that had sprung up, full grown in one short night, like a flower under tropical suns.
Better one pang for him at first than for a while the
