“Anything else?”
“You will not – understand, but – I am – shocked at the way they – behave.”
The Marquis looked down at her and thought no woman could look so lovely and at the same time so innocent and so pure.
Then he said quietly,
“l am going to tell you something, Carmella, that I have never talked about to anybody else before.”
He saw that she was listening intently as he went on,
“When I was young, younger than your brother, I fell in love with a very beautiful girl who would, from a worldly point of view, have made me an extremely suitable wife and our marriage would have been approved of both by her parents and by mine.”
He paused and then continued,
“She told me she loved me, but asked me to keep our feelings for each other secret for a little while.”
The Marquis’s voice
