Her only answer was a faint smile as at his incredulity to her state, or at his futile return to impossible hopes.
He had already forgotten, for the time, what strength she had found to make her body rigid.
"Fare thee well, then!" he cried, abruptly, and hastened, with steps almost as wild as hers had been, to the door leading to the passage.
A low sob arrested him at the threshold. He turned and looked at her; his heart, which seemed to have stopped as he was crossing the room to leave her, now began to beat madly.
She was not looking after him. She had not changed position. But, by the firelight, to which his sight was now accustomed, a welling up of moisture was visible in her eyes.
While he stood gazing at her, she gave another sob,—a convulsive note of despair, in which Marryott read a sense of her forlorn situation and possible fate; of being abandoned in dire illness, in an empty country-house, on this wildest of nights, to become, perchance, the prey of a vile, unscrupulous rascal.
By the time that Marryott, moving in long strides, had reached her side, her cheeks were wet with tears.
"Lady," he said, in a voice unsteady with emotion, as he flung himself on his knees beside her couch, and caught both her hands in his, "be not afraid! Though I forfeit my life, and fail in my cause, I will not go from you! May God above forgive me; and may those for whom I have these four days striven; and may my fathers, who never, for fear of man or love of woman, fell short of their given word! But I love thee! Ay, madam, 'tis a right I earn, that of holding thee thus in mine arms; thou know'st not what I pay for it! I love thee!"
He had resigned her hands, only that he might enfold her body; and she was so far from resisting his clasp that she had thrown her own arms, soft and warm, around his neck. She no longer wept, yet the tears still stood in her eyes; through them, however, as she met his impassioned gaze, glowed a light at once soft and powerful. Her nostrils heaved in quick but regular respirations. As his face neared hers, her lips seemed unconsciously to await the contact of his own. Nor did they fail of humid warmth when he pressed upon them a score of kisses.