Young Riczi held her now in an embrace more brutal. “Mine! mine!” he snarled toward the obscuring heavens.
“Yet it may be I must live. Friend, the man is very old. Is it wicked to think of that? For I cannot but think of his great age.”
Then Riczi answered: “My desires—may God forgive me!—have clutched like starving persons at that sorry sustenance. Friend! ah, fair, sweet friend! the man is human and must die, but love, we read, is immortal. I am wishful to kill myself, Jehane. But, oh, Jehane! dare you to bid me live?”
“Friend, as you love me, I entreat you to live. Friend, I crave of the Eternal Father that if I falter in my love for you I may be denied even the one bleak night of ease which Judas knows.” The girl did not weep; dry-eyed she winged a perfectly sincere prayer toward incorruptible saints. Riczi was to remember the fact, and through long years of severance.
For even now, as Riczi went away from Jehane, a shrill singing-girl was rehearsing, yonder behind the yew-hedge, the song which she was to sing at Jehane’s bridal feast.
Sang this joculatrix:
“When the Morning broke before us
Came the wayward Three astraying,
Chattering in babbling chorus,
(Obloquies of Aether saying),—