CHAPTER III.
When the trance of her delirious imaginations passed, they left her tranquil, but with the cold of death seeming to pass already from the form she looked on into hers. She was still crouching by his body on the hearth; and knew what she had chosen, and did not repent.
He was dead still;—or so she thought;—she watched him with dim dreaming eyes, watched him as women do who love.
She drew the fair glistening hair through her hands; she touched the closed and blue veined eyelids tenderly; she laid her ear against his heart to hearken for the first returning pulses of the life she had brought back to him.
It was no more to her the dead body of a man, unknown, unheeded, a stranger, and because a mortal, of necessity to her a foe. It was a nameless, wondrous, mystic force and splendor to which she had given back the pulse of existence, the light of day; which was no more the gods', nor any man's, no more the prey of death, nor the delight of love; but hers—hers—shared only with the greatness she had bought for him.
Even as she looked on him she felt the first faint flutter in his heart; she heard the first faint breath upon his lips.
His eyes unclosed and looked straight at hers, without reason or luster in them, clouded with a heavy and delirious pain.
"To die—of hunger—like a rat in a trap!" he muttered in his throat, and strove to rise; he fell back, senseless, striking his head upon the stones.
She started; her hands ceased to wander through his hair, and touch his cold lips as she would touch the cup of a flower; she rose slowly to her feet.