And he began to recite the Icelandic poet's passionate prayer to his love not to forsake him even though she should die and go to dwell in the mansions of heaven. "'Do not think I could not kiss a dead bride, or that I could not lay my arm about the waist of one pale in death and wrapped for burial.'"
He sat with his face turned away from her, his head bowed forward, his eyes resting on some point in the far distance.
But all that he had kept in check so well while they had been speaking, all that the soft enchantment of the evening, and the presence of the woman he loved, had not availed to loose, was freed in him now by the wild and powerful fervour of love that glowed through the poet's word. All his pent-up feeling poured out now in his voice.
"'Does not the summer sun kiss with like warmth the ice-clad mountain peak and the reddest rose? Are not white lilies loveliest of all flowers?'" Sven Elversson's voice trembled in the rush of the storm of love that raged within him.
Sigrun listened tensely for a few moments. Then suddenly she turned away, so that he should not see her face.
It was turned now toward the listener behind the trees. And he saw how, with features convulsed with passion, she, too, gave way to an outburst of feeling. Her eyes closed in pain, her hands were clenched together and her lips moved in silent plaint. Her husband could not hear the words, but from the movement of her lips he fancied he could read what she said.
"And I can never tell him—never!"
"'Come to me in autumn, when the winds rage over black waters,'" Sven Elversson went on, his voice one impassioned cry. "'At midnight, when the moon is hidden in stormy clouds.'"
The listener in his hiding-place shuddered with chilly dread. He saw Sigrun lift her arms with a gesture of intense longing. He saw how the whispering lips again and again shaped their cry of agony:
"And I can never tell him—never!"