“How you must love me,” he whispered tenderly, taking her in his arms and kissing her. “You would suffer worse than death for me; but you shall do better than that, dearest, you shall live for me.”
“Pray God it may be so; but this Governor is a hard enemy.”
“And we Bourbons are no easy ones. But how sweet to me this thought of your infinite love.” She smiled up to him and whispered with rueful self-reproach—
“Yet it could not spur my wits to remember what Lucette thought of on the instant.”
“Lucette is not as my Gabrielle. Her heart is under the discipline of her judgment.”
“And mine is all in all to me—all I have to live for; or so it seems almost. I cannot understand this sweet wild change in me. I am as one in a dream when I think of you, Gerard; self-centred, absorbed, self-lost. I had not thought it possible—for me. And yet that great blank past, when you were not in my life, is but a few hours ago. I seem to have stepped out of the wilderness with a single stride into a world all rich and lovely with delight. And it is real.”
“It shall always be real to us, dearest.”
“When these other shadows are past,” she sighed. “But they will pass I know. If I have my moods of doubt it is only the dread lest the dream shall be broken and I shall lose you.”
“Nothing shall part us, Gabrielle, not even death,” he declared earnestly.
“No. Not even death. For if I lost you, I should die. I should wish to die, indeed. And it is that which fills me with courage and energy to fight out with fight and conquer.”