Hellayne was sitting alone by the window in a long silent gallery. She could not take her eyes off the restless outline of the clouds where head on head and face on face continued taking shape. In vain her teased brain tried to see but clouds. Two nights ago had not a horrid face grinned at her from out of these same clouds? The face of a wolf it had seemed. And it had taken human shape and changed to the face of the man who had brought her to this abode from the sanctuary where she had fallen by the shrine.
And yet, as she looked at the sun, whose beams were fast dwindling on the bar of the horizon, how she yearned to keep the light a little longer, if only a few short minutes. She could have cried out to the sun not to leave her so soon, again to wage her lonely war with the Twilight and with Fear. For during the hours of day her lord was away. Business of state he termed what took him from her side. With a leer he left and with a leer he was wont to return. And with him the memory of his meeting with Tristan!
She had found him again, the man she loved! Found him—but how? And Hellayne covered her burning eyes with her white hands.
This other woman who had stepped in between her and Tristan, who had laid a detaining hand upon his arm and had silently challenged her for his possession—what was she to him?
For three days and three nights the thought had tormented her even to the verge of madness. Had she sacrificed everything but to find him she loved in the arms of another? Silently she had borne the taunts of her lord, his insults, his vile insinuations. He did not understand. He never understood. What of it? In the great balance what mattered it after all?
She must see Tristan. She must hear the truth from his own lips. In vain she puzzled her brain how to reach him. She remembered his last outcry of protest. There was a mystery she must solve. Come what might, she was once more the woman who loved. And she was going to claim the payment of love!
As regarded that other, to whom she had bound herself, her conscience had long absolved her of an obligation that had been forced upon her. Had fate and fact not proved the thing impossible? Had fate not cast them again and again into each other's arms and made mock of their conscience? Nature had made them lovers, let it be the will of God or the devil.
And lovers till death should they be henceforth. He belonged to her. Away with faith—away with fear of this world, or the next. Away with all but the dear present, in which the brutality of others had set her free. For a moment her thoughts turned almost pagan.
Was she to return to the old, loveless life in that far corner of the earth, while he whom she loved took up a new existence in the centre of the world, loving another to whose ambition he might owe a great career? She needed indeed to sit in silence, she who had done daring things without a misgiving, as if impelled by a power not her own. She had done them, marvelling at her own courage, at her own faith in him she loved, and she had not faltered.
The torturing dusk was drowning every living thing in pallid waves of shadow. One by one, through the wan gallery in which she was locked, the motley spectres of night would pass in all their horrors, and begin their crazy, soundless nods and becks.