“Oh, my lord!”
Unheeding, he went on:—
“Pestilence is rushing onward like a flood—There is no rock, no hilltop, that is not fated to be swallowed up in time. Diana, we are as those doomed by the Deluge, who have taken refuge on the mountain only to watch the deadly waters rise and count the hours left to them!”
He broke off; she had wrenched her hands from his grasp and had shrunk away from him, covering her face. Not the dreadful import of his words frightened her, but the fire of his glance, the mad exultation of the voice that thus pronounced their doom.
“What,” he exclaimed, his tones vibrating to a tenderness more terrible still to her ears, “have I scared thee?—Brave heart, afraid at last?”
“Yes, yes—I am afraid,” she murmured behind her clasped fingers. But, even as she spoke, her strong nature reacted against the folly of weakness. She dropped her hands, drew herself proudly up and turned, looking him steadily in the eyes:—
“No, my lord, ’twas but an evil thought!”
He returned her gaze fixedly, and she saw how the blood began to rise, slow, dark, in his cheek.
“Yet, why should I say we are doomed?” he went on, under his breath. “Why should not this house be as the ark of refuge? Diana,”—the dreadful joy broke out again in eye and accent,—“have you understood how it stands with us? There is no help for it; we are shut in together. Heaven itself has sealed the way that would divide us—”
So, it had come! That moment she had dreamt of, with a fierce abandonment to his ecstasy; that moment, the very thought of which she had prayed against with tears, as if the mere passage of its forbidden sweetness through her heart were a sin! It had come, in this bitterness, this shame, this shattering of the ideal she held so high! She moved from him without a word, let herself drop mechanically into the King’s chair, and sat, her hands clasping the carven arms, staring straight before her. Rockhurst fell on his knees beside her.