“No!” he said authoritatively. Then, fixing his eyes upon her with an altered look: “No, child,” he repeated. His voice was as much changed as his gaze. Gone from it the dangerous, even silkiness of his first speeches to her, as well as the quick sternness of the last words. This new voice, something said to her, was the voice of the real self that matched the noble countenance.
He put out his hand. After a pause she put hers on it. Later she wondered at herself that she had done so. But there are moments when some poignant emotion tears away the bodily mask, when souls are suddenly laid bare to each other. For some of us that is the moment when our belief in all that is good and beautiful dies. But Diana, in that flashing look into the soul of this unknown man (who had yet, within so short a measure of time, insulted her) read that to which her own soul leaped. The storm subsided in her heart. She suffered him to conduct her back to the chair by the fire, and watched him—wonderingly, yet no longer with fear—as he straightened himself and, with folded arms, stood yet a little while contemplating her.
In the hawk’s eyes there was a softened shadow. As he gazed the shadow deepened into tenderness.—He was looking at her as the exile might look at the receding shore of the land he will never see again; with a yearning that has passed beyond despair, and so grown serene. At length, sighing, he roused himself, and came forward, pushed the heavy table closer to her, and brought within her reach some of the viands that were spread upon it.
“You must eat,” he said. And, as she lifted her eyes again with her childlike, questioning look, his lips parted in a smile she thought beautiful, upon the gravity of his countenance: “You have not done with journeying yet to-night,” he explained.
He moved to the window as he spoke; and, as he drew the curtains aside, there came into the ruddy brown room a vision of a moonlit fairy world.
“There, too, I was wrong, you see,” he went on, speaking over his shoulder; “the snow-storms are passed, and there is your sister moon to show you the way—Diana.” Then, coming back again to the table, “You asked for a woman’s company. In this house there is no company fit for you.”
Her eyelid flickered over her startled glance. She gave a quick cry.
“Eat, then,” he went on in the same gentle tone, “while I make arrangements for your instant departure.”
The door was shut behind him. Diana involuntarily called after him; but his footsteps died away in the empty passages. The great silence of the house closed about her; and in the solitude her own thoughts seemed to clamour and crowd bodily upon her. She leaned her elbows on the table and buried her bright head in her hands.
Slighted … insulted … then served reverentially like a princess … looked at and spoken to like a beloved child. How was it that all the anger was dead in her heart, and that in its place reigned this feeling of pain and incomprehensible joy commingled? How was it that her fear was banished, that she would have trusted herself with him even in this house which his own lips had named evil?