He turned abruptly to the door, but she caught his arm. "What are you going to do? You will be seen!"
"So much the better; it will be at my proper measure—as a prowler, a housebreaker, a disturber of honest sleep!"
"No, no!" she protested in a panic. "You shall not; I will not have you taken for what you are not! I know—but they would not know! No one must see you leave this room! Do you not think of me?"
He caught his breath hard. "Think of you!" he repeated huskily. "Is there ever an hour when I do not think of you? Is there a day when I would not die to serve you? Yet in my very sleep—"
He paused, gazing at her where she stood in the half-light, a misty, uncertain figure. She was curiously happy. The delicious and pangless sense of guilt, however—the guilt of the hidden, not the blameworthy thing—that was tingling through her was for him a shrinking and acute self-reproach.
"Here!" he said under his breath. "To have brought myself here, of all places, for you of all women to risk yourself for me! I only know that I was wandering for years and years in a shadowy desert, searching for something that would not be found—and then, suddenly I was here and you were speaking to me! You should have left me to be dragged away where I could trouble no one again."
She was silent. "Forgive me," he said, "if you can. I—I can never forgive myself. How can I best go?"
For answer she moved to the window, slender and wraith-like. He followed silently. A million vague new impressions were clutching at him; the fragrance in the room was like a hypnotic incense veiling shadowy forms. Lines started from the blank:
And I swear, as I thought of her thus, in that hour,
And how, after all, old things were best,