“Ask your own heart,” was her response.
Gabriel covered his eyes with his hand.
“How the past rises up to inspire me,” he said. “I could dream here day by day like a mystic, and know no sin. If we could stride back five centuries and take life like a crystal globe untarnished in our hands! Armor should flash in yonder woods; trumpets cry upon these towers. Ever should your face look out upon these meadows, like the face of evening out of a cloudless sky. As for me, I should be young again, and a man.”
She looked at him out of her trustful eyes of gray, while her face seemed full of a calm glory of honor. There was no shadow as yet over her soul.
“Would you begin life anew?”
The man’s hands gripped the stone.
“Would to God it could be so!” he said. “I have sold my soul’s birthright for red pottage, for unlovely ease, and cowardly sloth. Life is a battle-field, not a garden; I have been awakened to the truth too late.”
Joan pondered his words for a moment.
“Is it not possible to begin life anew?” she asked.
“No.”