The girl put her arm before her eyes and shook as she stood. Pelleas fell on his knees with a cry, and reached for her hand.
“Igraine, Igraine!”
She snatched her arm away and would not look at him.
“My God, what is this, Igraine?”
“Don’t touch me; I am Gorlois’s wife!”
A vast silence seemed to fall sudden on the world. It might have been dead of night in winter, with deep snow upon the ground and no wind stirring in the forest. To Igraine, swaying in an agony with her arm over her face, the silence came like the hush that might fall on heaven before the damning of a lost soul to hell. She wondered what was in Pelleas’s heart, and dared not look at him or meet his eyes. God in heaven! would the man never speak; would the silence crawl on into an eternity!
At last she did look, and nearly fell at the wrench of it. Pelleas was standing near her looking at her with his great solemn eyes as though she had given him his death. His face seemed to have gone grey and haggard in a moment.
“Gorlois’s wife!” was all he said.
Igraine hung her head, shivered, and said nothing. Pelleas never stirred; he seemed like so much stone, a mere pillar of granite misery. Igraine could have writhed at his feet and caught him by the knees only to melt for a moment that white calm on his face that looked like the mask of death.