The words passed coldly over her: with her senses steeped in the radiance of light, that divinity of calm, that breadth of vision, that trance of awe, the chilliness and the bitterness of fact recoiled from off her intelligence, unabsorbed, as the cold rain-drops roll off a rose.
"It is so free!" she murmured, regardless of his words. "If I had only known—I would have asked it to take me so long ago. To float dead on it—as that bird floats—it would be so quiet there and it would not fling me back, I think. It would have pity."
Her voice was dreamy and gentle. The softness of an indescribable desire was in it.
"Is it too late?" he said, with that cruelty which characterized all his words to her. "Can you have grown in love with life?"
"You live," she said, simply.
He was silent; the brief innocent words rebuked him. They said, so clearly yet so unconsciously, the influence that his life already had gained on hers, whilst hers was to him no more than the brown seaweed was to the rock on which the waters tossed it.
"Let us go down!" he said, abruptly, at length; "it grows late."
With one longing backward look she obeyed him, moving like a creature in a dream, as she went away, along the side of the cliff through the shadows, while the goats lying down for their night's rest started and fled at the human footsteps.