After awhile the feverish mutterings of his voice were lower and less frequent; his eyes seemed to become sensible of the glare of the fire, and to contract and close in a more conscious pain; after a yet longer time he ceased to stir so restlessly, ceased to sigh and shudder, and he grew quite still; his breath came tranquilly, his head fell back, he sank to a deep sleep.
The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would have assailed creatures at once less savage and less innocent never moved her for an instant. That there was any strangeness in her position, any peril in this solitude, she never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the blood of Taric, could know no physical fear; and her mind at once ignorant and visionary, her temper at once fierce and unselfish, kept from her all thought of those suspicions which would fall on her, and chastise an act like hers; suspicions such as would have made a woman less pure and less dauntless tremble at that lonely house, that night of storm, that unknown fate which she had taken into her own hands, unwitting and unheeding whether good or evil might be the issue thereof.
To her he was beautiful, he suffered, she had saved him from death, and he was hers: and this was all that she remembered. She dealt with him as she would have done with some forest beast or bird that she should have found frozen in the woods of winter.
His head had fallen on her, and she crouched unwearied in the posture that gave him easiest rest.
With a touch so soft that it could not awaken him, she stroked the lusterless gold of his hair, and from time to time felt for the inaudible beating of his heart.
Innumerable dreams, shapeless, delicious, swept through her brain, like the echoes of some music, faint yet unutterably sweet, that half arouses and half soothes some sleeper in a gray drowsy summer dawn.
For the first time since the melodies of Phratos had died forever from off her ear she was happy.
She did not ask wherefore,—neither of herself or of the gods did she question whence came this wonder-flower of her nameless joy.
She only sat quiet, and let the hours drift by, and watched him as he slept, and was content.
So the hours passed.