The grip upon my arm grew tighter.
"Do not leave me," said Fitz in a hoarse whisper.
All night long the three of us walked up and down the lawns before the house. In one of the upper windows was a light. It was Sonia's room.
Few words passed between us, and in the main it was the King who spoke. Never once did Fitz relax his grip upon my arm. Indeed, as the hours passed, it seemed to grow more tense. It had the convulsive tenacity of one who in the last extremity fights to keep the body united to the soul.
Even I, who make no claim to be highly sensitised, was susceptible of the ominous challenge of the force that was enfolding us. Silence was even more terrible than speech. The resources of the ages were in the scale against us.
"For God's sake do not leave me!" said my unhappy friend in a whisper of terror.
At last the first faint pencilings of the dawn began to declare themselves in the upper air. My slippered feet were soaked and my teeth were chattering with the chill of the morning. A curious sensation, which I had never felt before, began to steal over me. With a thrill of suffocating, incommunicable horror I began slowly to realise that I was no longer the master of myself.
Fitz's convulsed grip was still upon my arm, but the sense of him had grown remote. He was slipping farther and farther away.
"Hold me!" he whispered; and again, "Hold me!" The stifled voice was like that of one in whose company I was drowning.
The voice of the King sounded quite near, although it was with dull stupefaction that I heard his words.