The Wounded Name

by D. K. Broster

Avoye had turned very pale, too. "But is not that rather a matter for me to decide? You know what I should think of so wicked a slander."

He shook his head, because he could hardly speak, and her proximity was getting more than his resolution could endure. So he slipped to one knee on the hearth and took up the abandoned bellows. "This fire is nearly out," he murmured. And as he blew the grey wood ashes stirred and eddied like ghosts; there was no glimmer underneath. The fire was out.

And on the settle Avoye de Villecresne, pressing her hands together, was saying to herself, "You a traitor . . . you! They dare to say such a thing!"

Aymar abruptly threw down the bellows and got to his feet.

"We must not tell Grand'mère. Are you ready to go, dear, or do you still wish to see old Eveno?"

She rose. "I am ready to go with you, Aymar," she said, in the sweet voice which sometimes held an echo of childhood. And she added, very low, "Always." But the voice which pronounced that word was a woman's.

Aymar heard; he looked at her with eyes of agony and ardour, lit with the flame of whose intensity she had never been quite aware, so carefully had it been controlled. He said, "Yes . . . it might be always now—since April. . . . Oh, my God, that it could be April again!"

And with that cry he caught her fiercely in his arms.

But the kiss was not fierce; it was the kiss that should have been given and taken under the stars in the orchard, clean and passionate and unprofaned. There was only one. Then Avoye dropped her head upon his breast. "My heart!" she murmured to his heart. And Aymar said, in a voice she had never heard from him before, "Beloved, your mouth is like apple blossom." For he was conscious just then of nothing but what he held in his arms. It was April again—for a few instants. All the horror and the stain were swept away; he had his brief moment of rapture, as intense as if she had come to him that spring evening, and as pure.

But it was very brief. The truth surged back upon him ten times more bitter for the ecstasy. He loosed his hold of her almost as if he were suddenly paralyzed; but her little hands were holding him fast by the lapels of his coat and all he could see was the top of her head, with its crown of burnished hair. Yet, though they were so close to each other, an icy stream seemed to Aymar to drive between them, of such a deadly cold that it sucked the breath from his heart.