"I will leave everything for you, my love, for you are all the world to me. There is nothing else now, but you. Nihilism and the cause it upholds, has sunk into utter insignificance, and has become a mere point in the history of my life, like a punctuating period that is placed at the end of a written sentence. Nihilists, great and small, have become mere atoms in the mystery of creation, and they can have no further influence upon my life. The czar of all the Russias is no more a personage to me now, than the merest black dwarf of central Africa, and Russia itself has diminuated to a mere island in the sea of eternity, a speck on the map of the infinite creation. You, Dubravnik——" She paused there and smiled into my eyes with an inimitable gesture of tenderness as she reached upward with her right hand and brushed back the hair from my temples—"I think I shall always call you Dubravnik. The name is yours, as I have known you, and as Dubravnik you are mine, as I am yours."
My reply to this was not a spoken word, and it needs no explanation.
"You, Dubravnik," she continued from the point where she so sweetly interrupted herself, "have become the universe to me, now. You are the infinite space which comprehends all."
It was sweet to hear her express herself so; sweeter still to know, that comprehensive as it was, it went but a little way toward explaining all that she would have liked to say; and sweetest of all to realize that she also exactly expressed my thought toward her, and that she knew she did so.
There was a long silence after that, broken only by her breathing, by a murmured word of caress, by a gesture of endearment or an occasional sigh; but I brought it to an end presently by asking a question which brought her out of her reverie with a start of affright.
"What was it, Zara, that you saw through the window when——" I did not complete the sentence. It was not necessary. She understood me instantly and with the understanding there returned to her a realization of all the terrors by which we were at that moment surrounded. We could love each other with a rhapsodical completeness, in perfect security, so long as we remained together inside that room; but beyond the walls of Zara's palatial home death stalked grimly, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the moment to strike.
She withdrew from my embrace, slowly and tentatively, but surely, until we no longer touched each other, and she gazed appealingly into my eyes while the flush of love forsook her cheeks and brow, giving place to a pallor of uncertainty and dread for me.
"I had forgotten," she murmured.
"Then continue to forget, my Zara," I whispered.
"No, we must not forget; we must remember." She raised her hand and pointed toward the window. "Out there, Dubravnik, death waits for you. I had forgotten. I had forgotten."