"Oh, child, forgive me, and forget me," he murmured. "I have been base to you,—brutal, and bitter, and cold oftentimes;—yet I would have loved you, if I could. Love would have been youth, folly, oblivion; all the nearest likeness that men get of happiness on earth. But love is dead in me, I think, otherwise——"
She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his embrace. Her brain reeled; her sight was blind. She trembled as she had never done under the sharpest throes of Flamma's scourge. Suddenly she cast her arms about his throat and clung to him, and kissed him in answer with that strange, mute, terrible passion with which the lips of the dying kiss the warm and living face that bends above them, on which they know they never again will rest.
Then she broke from him, and sprang into the maze of the moonlit fields, and fled from him like a stag that bears its death-shot in it, and knows it, and seeks to hide itself and die unseen.
He pursued her, urged by a desire that was cruel, and a sorrow that was tender. He had no love for her; and yet—now that he had thrown her from him forever—he would fain have felt those hot mute lips tremble again in their terrible eloquence upon his own.
But he sought her in vain. The shadows of the night hid her from him.
He went back to his home alone.
"It is best so," he said to himself.
For the life that lay before him he needed all his strength, all his coldness, all his cruelty. And she was only a female thing—a reed of the river, songless, and blown by the wind as the rest were.
He returned to his solitude, and lit his lamp, and looked on the creations that alone he loved.
"They shall live—or I will die," he said to his own heart. With the war to which he went what had any amorous toy to do?