"Do you know why I'm sorry to die? Because I die without your knowing how much I have loved you, how much I loved you after, especially— Oh! what a punishment! Do I deserve such an end?"
She hid her face in her hands. But immediately uncovered it, and, very pale, looked at me. An idea still more terrible seemed to have crushed her.
"Suppose I died," she stammered; "and while dying gave life——"
"Hush!"
"You understand——"
"Be silent, Juliana!"
I was more affected than she. Terror had overwhelmed me, and left me without even the power to emit a single word of consolation, to combat these imaginations of death with a single vivifying word. I, too, was sure of the atrocious end. In the violet darkness my eyes met Juliana's; and on that poor drawn face I thought I noticed symptoms of the death agony, symptoms of a dissolution that had already begun and that was inevitable. She could not repress a sort of shriek that resembled nothing human, and she clutched my arm convulsively.
"Help me, Tullio, help me!"
She clasped me hard, very hard, yet not hard enough. I should have liked to feel her nails penetrate my flesh, from a furious desire for physical torture that would put me in touch with her torture. Her forehead pressed against my shoulder, she continued to moan. Its note was that which renders the voice unrecognizable in the excess of corporeal suffering, the note that brings suffering man to the level of the suffering beast—the instinctive lamentation of all flesh in pain, whether animal or human.
From time to time she recovered her speech sufficiently to repeat: