“Not now,” she said, suddenly, and raised her face and looked calmly, yet not defiantly, back at him with her great, sad, and most lovely eyes. “I have passed beyond your power,” she went on. “Beyond most human influence, I might say—” then she shuddered and her eyes sank again. “But oh!” she cried, “at what a cost!—at what a cost!”
He felt as if his heart grew suddenly chill and stony. “I believe you are right,” he said; “my power is gone—yours is the strongest now.”
He was silent for a few moments. “One question only,” he then said; “I don’t wish to pry into your past. It is enough that we have met—for that would never have taken place if you had not needed me. So much I know. Your marriage—was it as I foretold?”
“It was worse,” she said, bitterly—“a million times worse! Body and soul, how I have suffered! And yet, as I told you then, it had to be.”
“I did not believe it then,” he said stormily; “I refuse to believe it now. Your misery was self-created. You voluntarily degraded yourself. What result could there be? Only suffering and shame.”
“The good of others,” she answered mournfully. “You cannot see it yet; but I know—it was foretold me. I did my work there. Sometimes I hope it is finished; but I do not know. One can never tell; at any time the summons may come again. God help me if it does.”
“Is your life in danger, then?” he asked, and again that chill and horror seemed to thrill the pulses of his beating heart.
“My life!” She lifted her eyes and looked back at his with something intensely mournful in her gaze. “As if that mattered! What is my life to me now, any more than it was then? Did I count the cost—did I call it a sacrifice? Life—the mere material actual life of the body—has never weighed with me for one moment. And yet,” she added, in a dull, strange voice, “I failed at the crucial test! Failed!—I, who had denied to myself all woman’s weakness, all mortal love, all fleshly vanities—failed! I am no more now than the veriest beginner on the path. I, who deemed myself so wise!”
Then she rose and came close to him, and laid her white hand on his arm. “That,” she said, “is why I needed you again. You can help me—you can tell me where and how I failed.”
That light touch thrilled his veins like sorcery. He bent his head and passionately kissed the white, soft hand. “You failed, oh, my Princess! because you are still mortal woman. Thank Heaven for it! You failed because memory and love were still strong in your heart. You failed—and I am by your side once more. Oh, let the past be forgotten! Brief is life, but love is its Paradise, and into that Paradise our feet once strayed. Fate stayed them on the threshold. But now—now—”