She felt his arms close about her, her face, torn with crying, pressed against his breast. So he held her till the vehemence of her weeping stilled, and her emotion appeared only in long convulsive breaths, like a child’s after a paroxysm of grief.
When Gordon spoke, it was to tell of sanguine news from the English Committee, of the application of French and German officers to serve under him, cheerful detail that calmed her.
A long pause ensued. “What are you thinking?” he asked at length.
She answered, her eyes closed, a mere murmur in his ear: “Of the evening you came to the garden at Ravenna.”
“It was moonlight,” he replied.
“You kissed a curl of my hair,” she whispered. “I slept with it across my lips that night.”
He bent and kissed her eyelids, her mouth, her fragile fingers. “My love!” he exclaimed.
“I wanted to be strong to-night,” she said piteously.
“You are strong and brave, too! Do I not know how you brought me to the casa—how you drank the mandragora?”
She shivered. “Oh, if it were nothing but a potion to-night—to drink, and to wake in your arms! Now I shall wake alone, and you—”