"Toinette!" he exclaimed--but he could say no more. She had thrown herself into his arms and hidden her streaming eyes, her glowing lips upon his breast.
"Calm yourself!" he ventured to murmur in her ear after a long pause, his lips touching her hair; suddenly she raised her head, and her face wore an expression of such blended happiness and anguish, that all his strength failed. "This is too much!" he faltered. "Spare me! You do not know what I have suffered!"
"I do know," she whispered amid her kisses. "I knew it in the first hour we were together--you're still mine, as you have ever been--you're mine, mine--as I've been your's, ever since I became a woman."
At this moment the clock in the old castle tower slowly struck twelve. A shudder ran through the frame of the man who clasped to his heart the woman who had been the object of his first love. It seemed as if a cold spectral hand was passing over his heart, quenching the fierce glow that threatened to destroy him. He released his lips from hers, and gently pushed away the slight figure that clung to his breast. "What have we done?" he exclaimed, retreating a step and averting his eyes.
"We have drunk when we were thirsty," said the impassioned woman, without lowering her glance. "Oh! it was but a drop on the hot stone! Why do you no longer look into my eyes, Edwin? Are you ashamed that you still love me, because in the old days I was childish and cold, and knew not what I did? The curse was still upon me, the curse of my birth, for which I've had to atone through all these years of suffering, to become at last another creature, a happy creature, new born through your love, Edwin! When I first saw you, early this morning, my heart received a blow that burst the lid of the coffin in which it was buried; and in the forest, how your every word, your glance, the pressure of your hand said to me: 'what are four years to a feeling that's eternal? I'm the same man, whom once you made miserable, but now all will be well again, since my happiness is yours.' Look into my eyes, Edwin, and tell me, if you can, that I have deceived myself!"
She had approached him and taken his hand. He did not withdraw it, but the glance that met hers was now so sad that she shrank back and let it fall.
"You have seen aright, my poor friend," he said in a hollow tone. "I am the same man, whom you made miserable. Yet nevertheless you have deceived yourself. What is now my happiness cannot be yours. Don't you know it? Have you entirely forgotten that I no longer belong to myself? My life is bound to another, and this other is dearer, should be dearer to me than my own existence."
"I know it," she replied, as she approached the little table and quietly rested both hands upon it. "But if it's true that this woman, to whom in an outburst of pride and anger you gave your hand, really loves you, will she be able to endure the sorrow, when she sees that she alone stands in the way of your happiness? I, if placed in such a situation, would rather die than assert a light which I had obtained in an unguarded moment, and which had at last become a sin against the claim of nature."
He gravely shook his head. "Listen to me," he said. "Sit down there, my beloved friend, and let us honestly endeavor to find some way out of this labyrinth. It would be easier for you to understand me, if you knew the woman whose life is so firmly bound to mine that nothing can separate us, not even what you call the claim of nature. She knows all. I've concealed nothing of what I suffered through you--"
"And you will be silent now?"