He was moved by the vibrating quality of the last words. She seemed to be talking low of some wonderful enchantment, in mysterious terms of special significance. He thought that if she only could talk to him in some unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether by the sheer beauty of the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and feeling.
“But,” she went on, “the name stuck in my head, it seems; and when you mentioned it—”
“It broke the spell,” muttered Heyst in angry disappointment as if he had been deceived in some hope.
The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still eyes the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended with a completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious before, because, till then, she had never felt herself swinging between the abysses of earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm. What if he should grow weary of the burden?
“And, moreover, nobody had ever believed that tale!”
Heyst came out with an abrupt burst of sound which made her open her steady eyes wider, with an effect of immense surprise. It was a purely mechanical effect, because she was neither surprised nor puzzled. In fact, she could understand him better then than at any moment since she first set eyes on him.
He laughed scornfully.
“What am I thinking of?” he cried. “As if it could matter to me what anybody had ever said or believed, from the beginning of the world till the crack of doom!”
“I never heard you laugh till today,” she observed. “This is the second time!”
He scrambled to his feet and towered above her.