He sighed. "Where are they?" he persisted.
"We were hard pressed at the ford," she answered with feigned reluctance. "And your litter delayed them. It was necessary to leave you or all had been lost."
He lay in silence awhile with closed eyes, considering what she had told him. At last, "And you stayed?" he murmured in so low a voice that the words were barely audible. "You stayed!"
"It was necessary," she answered.
"And you have been beside me all night?"
She bowed her head.
His eyes filled with tears, and his lips trembled, for he was very weak. He groped for her hand, and would have carried it to his lips, but as men kiss relics or the hands of saints--if she had not withheld it from him. Settling the thin coverings more comfortably round him, she gave him to drink again, softly chiding him and bidding him be silent--be silent and sleep.
But, "You have been beside me all night!" he repeated. "All night, alone here, and a woman! A woman!"
She did not tell him that she was not alone; that her woman was even then sitting outside, under strict orders not to show herself. For now she was assured that she was in the right path. She had had opportunities of studying his countenance while he slept, and she had traced in it those qualities of enthusiasm and weakness, of the libertine and the ascetic, which his career so remarkably displayed. The beauty which in ordinary circumstances his jaded eye, versed in woman's wiles, might neglect, would appeal with irresistible force in a garb of saintliness. Nay, more; as he recovered his strength and returned to his common feelings, it would prove, she felt sure, more provocative than the most worldly lures. Her resolve to carry the matter through was now fixed and immutable: and with her eye on the goal, she neglected no precaution that occurred to her mind.