"That John should take care of her?"—but John was going out to fight—and so was he—and they might both be killed—What then?
"Stépan knows, I am certain," he thought, "and he is true as steel; he must stand by her if we don't come back."
And then his thoughts flew to the vision of her sitting opposite him at the table, with her sweet eyes turned to his now and then, the faint violet shadows beneath them and the transparent exquisiteness of her skin telling their own story by the added, fragile beauty. Oh! what unutterable joy to hold her in his arms and whisper passionate love words in her little ears, to live again the dream of her dainty head lying prone there on his breast. Every pulse in his being throbbed to bursting, seeming almost to suffocate him.
"Amaryllis—Sweetheart!" he whispered aloud, and then started at his own voice.
He paced up and down the room, clenching his hands. The family might go on, but the two members of it must endure the pain of renunciation.
Which was the harder to bear, he wondered—his part of hopeless memory and regret, or John's of forced denial and abstinence?
In all the world, no situation could be more strange or more cruel.
He had felt deeply about it before he had seen Amaryllis. He thought of the myth of Eros and Psyche. His emotions had been much as Psyche's before she lit the lamp. And now the lamp had been lighted—his eyes had seen what his arms had clasped, the reality was more lovely than his dream, and passion was kindled a hundredfold. It swept him off his feet.
He forgot war and the horror of the time, he forgot everything except that he longed for Amaryllis.
"She is mine, absolutely mine," he said wildly. "Not John's."