“Didst really never guess who it was yonder steel armor hid?”
“Not once,” I said, “O sweetly dreadful!”
“Nor who it was that stirred the white maid to love over there in her home?”
“What!” I gasped. “Was that you?—was that your face, then, in truth I saw, reflecting in this dead girl’s when first I met her?”
“Why, yes, good merchant. And how you could not know it passes all comprehension.”
“And then it was you, dear and dreadful, who moved her? Jove! ’twas you who filled her beating pulses there down by the cedars, it was you who prompted her hot tongue to that passionate wooing? But why—why?”
That shadow looked away for a moment, and then turned upon me one fierce, fleeting glance of such strange, concentrated, unquenchable, impatient love that it numbed my tongue and stupefied my senses, and I staggered back, scarce knowing whether I were answered or were not.
Presently she went on. “Then, again, you are a little forgetful at times, my master—so full of your petty loves and wars it vexes me.”
“Vexes you! That were wonderful indeed; yet, ’tis more wonderful that you submit. One word to me—to come but one moment and stand shining there as now you do—and I should be at your feet, strange, incomparable.”
“It might be so, but that were supposing such moments as these were always possible. Dost not notice, Phœnician, how seldom I have been to thee like this, and yet, remembering that I forget thee not, that mayhap I love thee still, canst thou doubt but that wayward circumstance fits to my constant wish but seldom?”