Vàsàrhely remained kneeling beside her bed. His shoulders trembled with restrained emotion. Even now she shut him out of her life. She denied him the right to be her champion and avenger.
She moved her hand towards him as a blind woman would have done.
'Give me your word.'
'You are my law,' he answered. 'I will do nothing that you forbid.'
She inclined her head with a feeble gesture of recognition of the words. He rose slowly, kissed the white fingers that lay near him, and, without speaking, left her presence.
'Bloodshed, bloodshed!' she thought, in the vague feverish confusion of half-conscious thought. 'Though rivers of blood rolled between him and me what could they wash away of the shame that is with me for ever? What could death do? Death could blot out nothing.'
A sense of awful impotence lay upon her like a weight of iron. Do what she would she could never change the past! Her sons must grow to youth and manhood tainted and dishonoured in her sight. There were times when all the martial and arrogant spirit in her was like flame in her veins, and she thought: 'Could I but rise and kill him—I, myself!'
It seemed to her that it would be but justice.
When Vàsàrhely, coming out from her chamber, passed the impostor who had done her this dishonour, it cost him the greatest self-sacrifice of his life not to order him out yonder in the chilly twilight of the leafless woods, to stand before him in that ordeal of combat which, in the code of honour of the Magyar Prince, was the sole tribunal to which a man of honour could appeal. But she had forbade him to avenge her. He felt that he had no share in her life sufficient to give him title to disobey her. His own love for her told him that this offender was still dear enough to her for his life to be sacred in her sight.
'If I had not loved her,' he thought, 'I could have avenged her without suspicion; but what would it seem to her and to the world?—only that I slew him out of jealous rancour! In her soul she loves him still. Her hate will fade, her love will survive, traitor and hound though he be.'