turned, pointing to me. "This youth--this mad, incomprehensible youth--
what harm has he done YOU compared to what he has now done to me? He
loves me, he says--I don't understand his love--but why should he not?
Am I to fall in love with everybody who says that? Do you think you are
the only one? And--and--why!--you have never said that you loved me: no,
you have not. You just took to me, and made me work--your servant or
your doll--your plaything when you were done with the cafe--me, a
Gualandi of Siena--and you, a pig of Padua. Good Heaven, for what do you
take me, sir? Did you find me in the street? Is my family one of
wretches? Oh, what a man you are; ungrateful, cruel, hard as the grave.
Yes, yes, Nonna, fold me close in my cloak; it will keep me from such
cold as this." She stood, cloaked and ready: we all stood--the doctor
like a rock, I like a man dead at his prayers.

She looked from one of us to the other, to me second. "You told me that
you loved me, Don Francis," she said. "I am going to my mother. Will you
take me?"

I never loved her so well as at this moment when I said, "Madam, I dare
not do it."

She blushed, I know she was mute with astonishment. I thought old Nonna
would have torn my eyes out. "Dog!" she called me, "son of a dog."

"I dare not go with you, madam," I repeated. "I love you too well. I
have done you so much wrong, meaning to do right, that I dare not now
risk an act which I know to be wrong. Oh," I cried, as my distress grew,
"oh, unsay those words, Aurelia! You could not mean them, they were not
yours."