"I had forgotten!" she stammered. "How good of you!"
Otto regarded her with silent wonder, not unmingled with fear, for her countenance betrayed an anxiety he had never read in it before. And indeed her restlessness and terror seemed to increase with every moment. She answered Otto's questions evidently without knowing what she said, and her gaze turned frequently and with a devouring expression of anxiety and dread toward Castel San Angelo. Maddened and desperate with her own perfidy, she began to ruminate the most violent extremities, without perceiving one exit from the labyrinth of guile. The significance of Otto's question, his earnestness and his faith in herself put the crown on her misery. Her eyes grew dim and her senses were failing. Her limbs quaked and for a moment she was unable to speak. Otto bent over her in positive fear. The pale face looked so deathlike that his heart quailed at the thought of life,—life without her.
"I cannot bear it—I cannot bear it," he muttered, holding her hands in his tight grasp.
It seemed as if she had read his inmost, unspoken thoughts.
"And yet it must come at last!" she replied softly, as from the depths of a dream. "What is this short span of life for such love as ours? And,—had we even everything we could crave, all the world can give,—would there not be a sting in each moment of happiness at the thought—"
She paused. Her head drooped.
"My happiness is to be with you," he stammered. "I cannot count the cost!"
"Think you that I would count the cost?" she said. "And you love me despite of all those dreadful things, which he—Eckhardt—has poured into your ear?" she continued with low, purring voice.
"Love you—love you!" he repeated wildly. "Oh, I have loved you all my life, even before I saw you,—are you not the embodied form of all those vague dreams of beauty, which haunted my earliest childhood? That beauty, which I sought yearningly, but oh! so vainly in all things, that breathe the divine essence: the lustrous darkness of night, the glories of sunset, the subtle perfume of the rose, the all-reflecting ocean of poetry in which the Universe mirrors itself? In all have I found the same deep void, which only love can fill. Not love you," he continued covering both hands he held in his with fevered kisses, "oh, Stephania, I love you better than myself,—better than all things,—here and hereafter."
Almost paralyzed with fear she listened to his mad pleading.