“Art thou not in my arms? Doth not my heart tell thee how I love thee? I would rather die than part from thee. Each waking moment since we parted I have thought of Elvira, and dreamt of her each minute that I slept; and when I was on the sea, I said my love was as boundless as the waves.”
“I am dying with joy—dying; and yet—yet I am afraid; I am quite afraid. Put your hand upon my heart. Now, doth it beat?”
As she laid his hand upon her breast, there was heard the sound of a drum-roll. Immediately it destroyed the partial sense with which she had been blessed while speaking to her lover.
“Hark!” she said, hurriedly and terribly, “I know the sound, but now I fear it no longer. Yes, I tore her veil from off her head, and trampled on it. I did—I did. And—and thou wilt not leave me?”
“Great powers?” he cried, looking into her dreamy eyes; and in a great whirl of fear, he fell back from her.
There came floating on the air the exchange of the watchword, “England and Cromwell.”
“Come,” he said, moving towards the house: “let us go in.”
Then she was seized with a violent paroxysm. Calling out that he wished to leave her—to go back to her for whom she had been deserted. She poured forth shriek upon shriek till the air was all astir.
Alarmed at the sudden discovery he had made, he tried to fly from her, but she clung to him—still shrieking that he would leave her, and that he was going to the woman with whom he had fled.
“Be silent.”