But of it her lips never spoke.
"What is that to you?" she said, briefly. "If you turn the key, you will see. It was not of myself that I came here to speak. Give him liberty, and I will give you gratitude. Farewell."
Before he had perceived what she was about to do, she had left his side, and had vanished through one of the doors which stood open, on to the gardens without.
He sent his people to search for her on the terraces and lawns, but vainly; she was fleeter than they, and had gone through the green glades in the sunlight as fast as a doe flies down the glades of her native forest.
The old man sat silent.
CHAPTER II.
When she had outrun her strength for the moment, and was forced to slacken her speed, she paused to take breath on the edge of the wooded lands.
She looked neither to right nor left; on her backward flight the waters had no song, the marble forms no charm, the wonder-flowers no magic for her as she went; she had no ear for the melodies of the birds, no sight for the paradise of the rose-hung ways; she had only one thought left—the gold that she had gained.
The cruelty of his remarks had stabbed her with each of their slow keen words as with a knife; the sickness of a mortal terror had touched her for the instant, as she had remembered that it might be her fate to be not even so much as a memory in the life which she had saved from the grave. But with the first breath of the outer air the feebleness passed. The strength of the passion that possessed her was too pure to leave her long a prey to any thought of her own fate.