Yet something there was, I knew, that fascinated her as she gazed out upon the open; something which--as she turned round her face to me--I saw had startled, terrified her. For, pale as she had been since we had met again here, and with all the rich colouring that I loved so much gone from her cheeks, she was even whiter, paler than I had ever known her--in her eyes, too, a stare of astonishment, terror.
"Mervan!" she panted, catching her breath, her hand upon her heart, "Mervan, look, oh, look!" and she pointed through the window.
"See," she gasped, "see. The form of one whom I deemed dead--or is he in truth dead, and that his spectre vanishing into the dark wood beyond? See, the black horse, that which he bestrode that night--oh! Mervan--Mervan--Mervan--why has his spirit returned to earth? Will it haunt me forever--forever--punish me because of my shame of him?"
And while I saw the horseman's figure disappear now--and forever--into the darkness of the pine forest, she lay trembling and weeping in my arms. To calm which, and also bring ease to her troubled heart, I told her all.
CHAPTER XXXI.
ALWAYS TOGETHER NOW.
The frost held beneath a piercing east wind which blew across the mountains that separated Portugal from Leon, so that now the snow was as hard as any road and there was no longer any reason to delay our setting forth. And more especially so was this the case because my beloved appeared to have entirely recovered from the fever into which she had been thrown by the events of the past weeks.
"I am ready, Mervan," she said to me the next day, "ready to depart, to leave forever behind these lands--which I hope never to see again--to dwell always in your own country and near you."
Wherefore I considered in my mind what was best now to be done.
That we were safe here in Portugal we knew very well--only it was not in Portugal that we desired to remain, but rather to escape from; to cross the seas as soon as might be--to reach England or Holland. Yet how to do that we had now to consider.