[HIS KINGDOM.]
Count Hannibal could not have said why he did not speak to her at once. Warned by an instinct vague and ill-understood, he remained silent, his eyes riveted on her, until she rose from the floor. A moment later she met his gaze, and he looked to see her start. Instead she stood quiet and thoughtful, regarding him with a kind of sad solemnity, as if she saw not him only, but the dead; while first one tremor and then a second shook her frame.
At length, "It is over!" she whispered. "Patience, monsieur; have no fear, I will be brave. But I must give a little to him."
"To him!" Count Hannibal muttered, his face extraordinarily pale.
She smiled with an odd passionateness. "Who was my lover!" she cried, her voice a-thrill. "Who will ever be my lover, though I have denied him, though I have left him to die! It was just. He who has so tried me knows it was just! He whom I have sacrificed--he knows it too, now! But it is hard to be--just," with a quavering smile. "You who take all may give him a little, may pardon me a little, may have--patience!"
Count Hannibal uttered a strangled cry, between a moan and a roar. A moment he beat the coverlid with his hands in impotence. Then he sank back on the bed. "Water!" he muttered. "Water!"
She fetched it hurriedly, and, raising his head on her arm, held it to his lips. He drank, and lay back again with closed eyes. He lay so still and so long that she thought that he had fainted; but after a pause he spoke. "You have done that?" he whispered, "you have done that?"
"Yes," she answered, shuddering. "God forgive me! I have done that! I had to do that, or----"
"And is it too late--to undo it?"
"It is too late." A sob choked her voice.