'My friend, you are one of those on whom the eyes of women willingly rest, perhaps too willingly. But you—you will have no eyes for any other now? You must deserve my faith in you. Is it not so?'
'Ah, madame,' he answered with deep emotion, 'all words seem so trite and empty; any fool can make phrases, but when I say that my life shall be consecrated to her, I mean it, in the uttermost royalty, the uttermost gratitude.'
'I believe you,' said the Princess, as she laid her hand lightly on his bent head. 'Perhaps no man can understand entirely all that she surrenders in admitting that she loves you; for a proud woman to confess so much of weakness is very hard: but I think you will comprehend her better than any other would. I think you will not force her to pass the door of disillusion; and remember that though she will leave you free as air—for she is not made of that poor stuff which would enslave what it loves—she would not soon forgive too great abuse of freedom. I mean if you were ever—ever unfaithful——
'For what do you take me?' he cried, with indignant passion. 'Is there another woman in the world who could sit beside her, and not be dwarfed, paled, killed, as a candle by the sun?'
'You are only her betrothed,' said the Princess, with a little sigh. 'Men see their wives with different eyes; so I have been told, at least. Familiarity is no courtier, and time is always cruel.'
'Nay, time shall be our dearest friend,' said Sabran, with a tenderness in his voice that spoke more constancy than a thousand oaths. 'She will be beautiful when she is old, as you are; age will neither alarm nor steal from her; her bodily beauty is like her spiritual, it is cast in lines too pure and clear not to defy the years. Oh, mother mine! (let me call you that) fear nothing; I will love her so well that, all unworthy now, I will grow worthy her, and cause her no moment's pain that human love can spare her.'
'Her people shall be your people, and her God your God,' murmured the Princess, with her hand still lying lightly on his head, obediently bent.
When late that night he went across the lake the monks were at their midnight orisons; their voices murmured as one man's the Latin words of praise and prayer, and made a sound like that of a great sea rolling slowly on a lonely shore.
He believed naught that they believed. Deity was but a phrase to him; faith and a future life were empty syllables to him. Yet, in the fulness of his joy and the humiliation of his spirit, he felt his heart swell, his pride sink subdued. He knelt down in the hush and twilight of that humble place of prayer, and for the first moment in many years he also praised God.
No one heeded him; he knelt behind them in the gloom unnoticed; he rose refreshed as men in barren lands in drought are soothed by hearing the glad fall of welcome rain. He had no place there, and in another hour would have smiled at his own weakness; but now he remembered nothing except that he, utterly beyond his deserts, was blessed. As the monks rose to their feet and their loud chanting began to vibrate in the air, he went out unheard, as he had entered, and stood on the narrow strip of land that parted the chapel from the lake. The green waters were rolling freshly in under a strong wind, the shadows of coming night were stealing on; in the south-west a pale yellow moonlight stretched broadly in a light serene as dawn, and against it there rose squarely and darkly with its many turrets the great keep of Hohenszalras.