She leaned down close by his side, and looked on him,—sorrowful, because he alone of all the gods was stricken there, and he alone had the shadow of mortality upon him.
Looking thus she saw that his hands were clinched upon his chest, as though their latest effort had been to tear the bones asunder, and wrench out a heart that ached beneath them. She saw that this was not a divine, but a human form,—dead indeed as the rest were, but dead by a man's death of assassination, or disease, or suicide, or what men love to call the "act of Heaven," whereby they mean the self-sown fruit of their own faults and follies.
Had the gods slain him—being a mortal—for his entrance there?
Marcellin in legends had told her of such things.
He was human; with a human beauty; which, yet white and cold and golden, full of serenity and sadness, was like the sun-god's yonder, and very strange to her whose eyes had only rested on the sunburnt, pinched, and rugged faces of the populace around her.
That beauty allured her; she forgot that he had against her the crime of that humanity which she hated. He was to her like some noble forest beast, some splendid bird of prey, struck down by a bolt from some murderous bow, strengthless and senseless, yet majestic even in its fall.
"The gods slew him because he dared to be too like themselves," she thought, "else he could not be so beautiful,—he,—only a man, and dead?"
The dreamy intoxication of fancy had deadened her to all sense of time or fact. The exaltation of nerve and brain made all fantastic fantasies seem possible to her as truth.
Herself, she was strong; and desolate no more, since the eyes of the immortals had smiled on her, and bade her welcome there; and she felt an infinite pity on him, inasmuch as with all his likeness to them he yet, having incurred their wrath, lay helpless there as any broken reed.
She bent above him her dark rich face, with a soft compassion on it; she stroked the pale heavy gold of his hair, with fingers brown and lithe, but infinitely gentle; she fanned the cold pain of his forehead, with the breath of her roselike mouth; she touched him and stroked him and gazed on him, as she would have caressed and looked on the velvet hide of the stag, the dappled plumage of the hawk, the white leaf of the lily.