The flush came again, and for the first time her eyes fell away from his with a sort of timidity.
"I could not—leave you, lord," she said, whispering again. "I could not see you hurt or slain or a prisoner. And then when, through accident, you lay hurt, after all, I could not leave you so."
"But why? Why?" he persisted, staring down upon her with troubled eyes. "Arbe was in the hollow of your hand! You are the head of those barbarians who hold the city. Yet you desert them to succor me. Why?"
"If you cannot see, lord," she said, hiding her face with her hands, "then I cannot tell you."
Young Zuan gave a sudden cry.
"O God of Miracles!" said he, under his breath. His heart was racing very madly and the veins at his temples throbbed until he thought that they must burst.
He put out faltering hands and took the woman's hands from her face.
"What is it," he said, "that—has come to me to rob me of strength and thought when I am near you? What is it that came to me last night when you first crept into the fisherman's hut and I saw your eyes?"
"Lord," she said, very low, "I think it is love."
Her hands slipped from between his lax palms, and young Zuan got to his feet blindly and moved a few paces away. He put his arms up against the trunk of a tree and laid his face upon them. Through the whirl of things which beset him he had a dull consciousness that his cherished world—all his sane, ordered life, his duty, his ambitions, his pride of race—was slipping from him, receding into a misty background, leaving him face to face with something that was immeasurably, unthinkably great—something for which he had been begotten and born—something which drew him towards itself with a might that no puny strength of his could combat.