now this pretty pair had been there for six months.

Massimilla, now twenty, had not sacrificed her religious principles to
her passion without a struggle. Still they had yielded, though
tardily; and at this moment she would have been ready to consummate
the love union for which her mother had prepared her, as Emilio sat
there holding her beautiful, aristocratic hand,--long, white, and
sheeny, ending in fine, rosy nails, as if she had procured from Asia
some of the henna with which the Sultan's wives dye their fingertips.

A misfortune, of which she was unconscious, but which was torture to
Emilio, kept up a singular barrier between them. Massimilla, young as
she was, had the majestic bearing which mythological tradition
ascribes to Juno, the only goddess to whom it does not give a lover;
for Diana, the chaste Diana, loved! Jupiter alone could hold his own
with his divine better-half, on whom many English ladies model
themselves.

Emilio set his mistress far too high ever to touch her. A year hence,
perhaps, he might not be a victim to this noble error which attacks
none but very young or very old men. But as the archer who shoots
beyond the mark is as far from it as he whose arrow falls short of it,
the Duchess found herself between a husband who knew he was so far
from reaching the target, that he had ceased to try for it, and a
lover who was carried so much past it on the white wings of an angel,
that he could not get back to it. Massimilla could be happy with
desire, not imagining its issue; but her lover, distressful in his
happiness, would sometimes obtain from his beloved a promise that led
her to the edge of what many women call "the gulf," and thus found
himself obliged to be satisfied with plucking the flowers at the edge,