Her face was turned away from him, but he saw the faint color deepen in her cheeks and the light quivering of the lip. And then a torrent of feeling, before which his last shaking barriers of resistance crumbled away like dust, swept from his heart, striking every chord of his nature with a crash of wild music.
"Helen, my love, my love!" he cried.
And she turned round, her eyes dim with trembling tears, yet glowing with a great happiness—turned around to feel his arms steal around her and hold her clasped to his heart in a mad sweet embrace. And it seemed to her that it was for this that she had lived.
CHAPTER XXIV
A WOMAN'S LOVE
It seemed to him in those few golden moments of his life that memory died away and time stood still. The past with its hideous sorrows, and the future over which it stretched its chilling hand, were merged in the present. Life had neither background nor prospect. The overpowering realization of the elysium into which he had stepped had absorbed all sense and all knowledge. They were together, and words were passing between them which would live to eternity in his heart.
But the fairest summer sky will not be fair forever. Clouds will gather, and drive before them the sweetness and joy from the smiling heavens, and memory is a mistress who may slumber but who never sleeps. Those moments of entrancing happiness, although in one sense they lasted a lifetime, were in the ordinary measure of time but of brief duration. For with something of the overmastering suddenness with which his passion had found expression, there swept back into his heart all the still cold flow of icy reminiscence. She felt his arms loosen around her, and she raised her head, wondering, from his shoulder, wonder that turned soon to fear, for he rose up and stood before her white, and with a great agony in his dark eyes.
"I have been mad!" he muttered hoarsely. "Forgive me! I must go!"
She stood up by his side, pale, but with no fear or weakness in her look. She, too, had begun to realize.