It was only a faint glimmer of light that he showed her, but no more was needed for the rekindling of bright hopes in Maia's heart.
"Yes, I shall go to papa!" she cried. "I shall implore him on my knees not to part us. You cannot have done anything so dreadful, so unpardonable, and he will and shall hear me. But--would it not be better for you to go with me?"
"No, it would be in vain! But now go! go!--time is precious."
He urged her almost anxiously to leave, and yet when she actually did turn to go, he suddenly stretched out to her both arms.
"Come to me, Maia! Tell me once more that you love me, that you wanted to go with me, in spite of everything?"
The young girl flew back to him again and nestled up to him.
"You dread lest I should not stand firm? I'll share everything with you, Oscar, though it were the worst. Nothing can separate us. I love you beyond everything."
"Thank you!" said he, fervently. Suppressed feeling quivered in his voice; from his eyes, too, that sinister glare had departed, and they now beamed with unutterable tenderness. "Thank you, my Maia! You have no idea what a freeing, absolving influence that speech has had upon me, what a boon you bestow upon me in its utterance. Perhaps you are about to learn from your father's lips what I cannot tell you. If all of you, then, condemn and cast me from you forever, then remember that I loved you, loved you devotedly. How much I never realized until this moment--and I shall prove it to you."
"Oscar, you stay here?" asked Maia, agonized by a dark foreboding.
"I stay at Odensburg, my word for it--and now, go, my dear!"