"It is all your promises fulfilled," he said, as he went out of the room without looking back. But it was Lilla whose arm he touched in passing.
David Verne sat gazing before him, his sunken eyes shining in his face of a sick, young Apollo in bronze. But soon, turning his eyes toward Lilla:
"All you!"
She gathered his hands against her bosom with a movement that imparted to him the life so violently pounding in her heart—the pride and the hope, perhaps even a little of the defiance and belief. She gave him a look that pierced the caverns of his brain, where his faith in death resided blackly, with a white-hot faith in life.
"Have you forgotten," she breathed, "that a little while ago you, and every one else, would have called this impossible?"
"Too much!" he whispered, peering at her with a dreadful longing across the chasm that lay between her will and his terror of extinction.
"No! You shall see!"
She felt that this must be the object of her life-long wishes and antipathies—that her sense of the preciousness of mortal life and beauty, and her hunger for participation in the development of both, were instincts intended to make her indomitable now. Suddenly she had one of those rare moments when the wall is so strengthened by a feeling of worthy purpose that it becomes tremendous, and everything opposed to it seems as good as vanquished. It was with an accent of accomplished victory that she repeated:
"You shall see!"
And now, indeed, the drowning man clutched at the flower that epitomized the dear world.