They sank with a little shiver of the severed water.
He caught her wrist a second too late.
"What madness! What have you done? You throw your gold away to the river-swamp for me, when I have not a shred worth a copper-piece to pay you back in their stead! I did not mean to hurt you; it was only the truth,—you could not have shamed me more. You bring on me an indignity that I can neither requite nor revenge. You have no right to load me with debts that I cannot pay—with gifts that I would die sooner than receive. But, then, how should you know?—how should you know? If I wounded you with sharp words, I did wrong."
There was a softness that was almost tenderness in his voice as he spoke the last phrases in his self-reproach; but her face did not change, her eyes did not lose their startled horror; she put her hand to her throat as though she choked.
"You cannot do wrong—to me," she muttered, true, even in such a moment, to the absolute adoration which possessed her.
Then, ere he could stay her, she turned, without another word, and fled out from his presence into the dusk of the night.
The rushes in the moonlight sighed where they grew by the waterside above the sands where the gold had sunk.
A thing more precious than gold was dead; and only the reeds mourned for it. A thing of the river as they were, born like them from the dust, from the flood, and the wind, and the foam; a thing that a god might desire, a thing that a breeze might break.