“Come, Pelleas, and sit by me under the trees, and I will tell you the whole tale.”
Never had she seemed so stately or so superb in Pelleas’s eyes as she stood before him that morning, strong and sorrowful with the burden of her past. He knelt and looked up at her, knowing himself pardoned, humbled to see love in the ascendent so soon upon her face as she looked down at him from her golden aureole of hair.
“I am forgiven?” he said.
“Ah, Pelleas!”
“You have shamed me; I am a broken man.”
He rose up half wearily and stood looking at her as though some mysterious influence had parted them suddenly asunder. So expressive were his eyes, that Igraine read a distant anguish in them on the instant, and fathomed his thoughts, to the troubling of her own heart.
“Look not so,” she said, “as though a gulf lay deep between us here.”
“How else should I look at you, Igraine, when you are wife to Gorlois?”
“Never in my soul.”
“How can that help us?”