Just so had he looked so long ago—so long!—in the deep woods at moonrise, when he had played to the bounding fawns, to the leaping waters, to the listening trees, to the sleeping flowers.
They had called him an outcast,—and lo!—she found him a god.
She sank on her knees, and buried her face in her hands and wept,—wept with grief for the living lost forever,—wept with joy that the dead forever lived.
Tears had rarely sprung to her proud, rebellious eyes; she deemed them human things,—things of weakness and of shame; she had thrust them back and bit her lips till the blood came, in a thousand hours of pain, rather than men should see them and exult. The passion had its way for once, and spent itself, and passed. She rose trembling and pale, with her eyes wet and dimmed in luster, like stars that shine through rain, and looked around her fearfully.
She thought that the gods might rise in wrath against her, even as mortals did, for daring to be weary of her life.
As she rose, she saw for the first time before the cold hearth the body of a man.
It was stretched straightly out on the stone floor; the chest was bare; upon the breast the right hand was clinched close and hard; the limbs were in profound repose; the head was lit by the white glimmer from the moon; the face was calm and colorless, and full of sadness.
In the dim strange light it looked white as marble, colossal as a statue, in that passionless rest,—that dread repose.
Instinctively she drew nearer to him, breathless and allured; she bent forward and looked closer on his face.
He was a god, like all the rest, she thought; but dead,—not as they were dead, with eyes that rejoiced in the light of cloudless suns, and with lips that smiled with a serene benignity and an eternal love,—but dead, as mortals die, without hope, without release, with the breath frozen on their tired lips, and bound on their hearts eternally the burden of their sin and woe.