He did not answer her.
“Will you ever miss me, Gavan?”
He did not answer.
“Won’t you even remember me?” she asked.
And still he did not answer, sitting with downcast eyes. And she saw that he could not, and in his silence, of a dumb torture, was his reply. He looked the stricken saint, pierced through with arrows. And which of them was the victim, which the executioner?
With her question a clearness, quieter, deeper, came to her, as though in the recoil of its engulfing anguish she pushed her way from among vibrating discords to a sudden harmony that, in holy peace, resolved them all in unison. Her eyelids fluttered down while, for an instant, she listened. Yes, under it all, above it all, holding them all about, there it was. She seemed to see the pain mounting, circling, flowing from its knotted root into strength and splendor. But though he was with her in it he was also far away,—he was blind, and deaf,—held fast by cruel bonds.
“Look at me,” she commanded him gently.
And now, reluctantly, he looked up into her eyes.
They held him, they drew him, they flooded him. With the keenness of life they cut into his heart, and like the surging up of blood his love answered hers. As helpless as he had ever been before her, he laid his head on her breast, his arms encircling her, while, with closed eyes, he said: “Don’t think that I don’t feel. Don’t think that I don’t suffer. It’s only that;—I have only to see you;—something grasps me, and tortures me—“
“Something,” she said, her voice like the far flute echo of the voice that had spoken on that night in the old Scotch garden, “that brings you to life—to God.”