At last the Ionic marble columns, softly steeped in the warmth of departing day, came into sight. Silence and coolness encompassed him. The setting sun still cast his glimmer on the capitals of the columns whose fine, illumined scroll work, contrasted with the penumbral shadows of the interior, seemed soft and bright as tresses of gold.
A hand softly touched Otto's shoulder. A voice whispered:
"If you would know all—come! Come and I will tell you the secret which never yet I have uttered to mortal man."
In the departing light, veiled by the thick cypresses and pale as the moon-beams, just as in the Egerian wilderness in the whiteness of summer-lightnings, she put her face close to his, her face white as marble, with its scarlet lips, its witch-like eyes.
On they walked in silence, hand in hand.
On they walked along the verge of a precipice, where none have walked before, resisting the vertigo and the fatal attraction of the abyss. If they should prove unequal to the strain,—overstep the magic circle?
Stephania was pale and trembled. She smiled,—but the smile troubled him, he scarce knew why. He tried to think it was the melancholy, caused by the wild and stormy look of the sunset and the loud cawing of the hereditary rooks, which seemed to croak an everlasting farewell to life and hope in the oaks of the convent.
Must he repulse the love that surged up to him in resistless waves?
Must he renounce the near for the far-away, the ideal, whose embodiment she was, for the commonplace?
Slowly the sun sank to rest in a sea of crimson and gold, a fiery funeral of foliage and flowers.