“Berenice,” he cried softly.
Berenice was lying in a crumpled heap on the low couch
She did not answer. She was asleep. He stood looking down upon her, his heart full of an infinite tenderness. She, too, had suffered, then. Her hair was in wild confusion, and there were marks of recent tears upon her pale cheeks. A little lace handkerchief had slipped from her fingers down on to the floor. He picked it up. It was wet! The glow of the heavily-shaded lamp was upon her clasped white fingers and her bowed head. He watched the rising and falling of her bosom as she slept. To him, so great a stranger to women and their ways, there was a curious fascination in all the trifling details of her toilette and person, the innate daintiness of which appealed to him with a very potent and insidious sweetness. Whilst she slept, he felt as one far removed from her. It was like a beautiful picture upon which he was gazing. The passion which had been raging within him like an autumn storm was suddenly stilled. Only the purely æsthetic pleasure of her presence and his contemplation of it remained. It seemed to him then that he would have had her stay thus for ever! Before his fixed eyes there floated a sort of mystic dream. There was another world—was it the world of sleep or of death?—where they might join hands and dwell together in beautiful places, and there was no one, not even their consciences, to say them nay. The dust of earthly passion and sin, and all the commonplace miseries of life, had faded for ever from their knowledge. It was their souls which had come together ... and there was a wonderful peace.
Then she opened her eyes and looked up at him. There was no more dreaming! The old, miserable passion flooded his heart and senses. His feet were upon the earth again! The whole world of those strange, poignant sensations, stronger because of their late coming, welled up within him.
“Berenice!”
She was only half awake, and she held up her soft, white arms to him, gleaming like marble through the lace of her wide sleeves. She looked up at him with the faint smile of a child.
“My love!”
He stooped down, and her arms closed around him like a soft yoke. But he kissed her forehead so lightly that she scarcely realized that this was almost his first caress.