“All my worlds are yours. Surely, you must take them. From their creation the scheme of their existence was for you!”
Like a caress the light of ruby and of green fell upon Rondah’s coronet and kissed her red-gold braids. Her pale, perfect face was pink with the light. Her lovely eyes burned with the glory of both colors.
“I will not go! I will stay in Regan’s star!”
Slow, very slow, her answer, as if a sort of paralysis had touched her.
“He is a foe to Regan,” whispered her wifely faith, “triumphant and gorgeous while Regan is asleep in winter helplessness. Thank Heaven it is the last winter!”
“I hate you!” whispered her heart; almost her lips uttered the words.
“I love you!” cried the man, with an awful prayer in his voice. “I have waited years for a smile or a word. I will not return to my sun without you! Oh! come to your fate with me! You will come, Rondah, you will come?”
And now he caught her hands and turned her reluctant eyes to look at him.
It was not of duty—her strength—for duty with its care was forgotten in the dulling peace of the Sun Island. Love’s might was asleep from the same influence. No strength came from the puny star on which she stood. Rondah felt the words of this man’s speaking move her soul like Heaven. An ambition, which was the most powerful characteristic of her humanity, was wakened into quick, living unrest by his picture of the glorious world. His clinging hands seemed to hold her as a bond miraculous. Dead—faith, hope, trust, love—all dead with the Sun Island’s peace and the star’s cold!
Ah, it was from that Earth, that grand old Earth, away in space, remote, lost! It was the stern, narrow-fenced faith of her childhood which came now and stood in her heart and made her able to break all bonds of this unholy forging—that faith at which Regan had scoffed so often when it upheld Father Renaudin years before. It saved Rondah, his wife, when she had almost forgotten Regan.