Vàsàrhely shrank from his praise as though from some insolence. He did not look at Sabran; he spoke briefly between his closed teeth. All his soul was full of longing to strike this man; to meet him in open combat and to kill him; forcing him and his foul secret together down underneath the sole sure cover of the grave. But the sense that so near, within a few feet of them, she lay in peril of her life, made even vengeance seem for the moment profane and blasphemous.
'There will be always time,' he thought.
That hushed and darkened chamber hard by awed his hatred into silence. What would she wish? What would she command? Could he but know that, how clear would be his path!
He hesitated a moment, then turned away.
'I shall wait here until the danger is past, or she is called to God,' he said hoarsely.
Then he walked away down the corridor slowly, like a man wounded with a wound that bleeds within.
Sabran stood awhile where he had left him, his eyes bent on the ground, his heart sick with shame.
'He was worthy of her!' he thought with the most bitter pang of his life.
Three more days and nights passed; they were to him like a hideous nightmare; at times he thought with horror that he would lose his reason. The dreadful stillness, the dreadful silence, the knowledge that death was so near that bed which he dared not approach, the impossibility of learning what memories of him, what hatred of him, might not be haunting the stupor in which she lay, together made up a torture to which her bitterest reproach, her deadliest punishment would have seemed merciful.
All through that exhaustion, in which they believed her mind was without consciousness, the memory of all that he had told her was alive in it, in that poignant remembrance which the confusion of a dulled brain only makes but the more terrible, turning and changing what it suffers from into a thousand shapes. In her worst agony this consciousness never left her; she kept silence because in her uttermost weakness she was strong enough not to give her woe to the ears of the others, but in her heart there seemed a great knife plunged, a knife rusted with blood that was dishonoured.