He strode toward her as though to embrace her, but warned by her attitude of aloofness, merely imprinted a kiss upon her hand. He could well afford to bridle his passions so as not to offend her before the excursion to Naxos.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Agne’s Advice.
“Could love part thus? was it not well to speak,
To have spoken once? It could not but be well.”
Tennyson.
Alone in the darkness outside the cave of Pluto, the words of Agne kept ringing in Persephone’s ears:—“Live first! A mother will present the truths more vividly than one who has never known the joys and pangs of motherhood.” Was this longing which filled her being, love for the man who had just left her, or was it merely an indefinable desire to fulfill the requirements of nature in regard to her sex?
A short distance away the massive temple stood in dim relief against a starry sky. An occasional group of celebrants passing between it and the silent figure of the girl, revealed the sacred edifice and its precincts in the fluctuating lights of their torches. Life to Persephone had not been unlike that solid masonry, which had stood since it was built, unaffected by storms without, but now the flickering lights revealed it in a new aspect; showed it by the wavering illumination to contain secret nooks and crannies which had before been invisible. So had this new emotion lighted Persephone’s soul till it brought into evidence secret chambers of her being of which she had been heretofore unconscious.
Once before this yearning had taken possession of her being—she blushed with shame to think of it, but it was when the Persian officer had kissed her, after they had witnessed together the great battle. Of course it was wicked, she thought to herself, to think of that brute who had dared contemptuously to push aside the first civilities of their acquaintance, and behave in such a rude manner, for Ephialtes who was a Greek had never dared——
“Anyway,” she said half aloud, “he was probably killed at Platæa and it serves him right—only—of course—death is a pretty severe penalty just for kissing a girl, even if one has no right to do it—no, I hope he isn’t dead. He wasn’t as handsome as Ephialtes, but there was something more courageous and masterful about him, and his eyes didn’t shrink from looking right into mine—”
With her hand upon her breast, her eyes wide and bright, she said aloud:—“Live first! A mother will present the truths more vividly than one who has never known the joys and pangs of motherhood.”