"Oh, my love!" she murmured, as she drew him farther and farther from the place where his foe slept. "Give me this one thing, and you shall have all my life. Let him be—let him be. He took all; he shall not take you. Come, come, come!"
He held back still, while still her arms clung to him, and drew him onward and onward to leave his murderer in peace.
"One word only," he muttered, close in her ear, while his lips, as they brushed her throat, scorched it like fire. "You deny me my vengeance. Is it for love of me—or pity of him?"
The eyes, that he could have sworn were true as he would have sworn that the stars shone above them, looked up long into his; there was a depth of pain in them that smote and stilled his wrath as with a sudden awe.
"Both. I love you, as I never thought it in me to love any—the living or the dead; and I pity him, as the earliest, the latest, the most wretched of all my enemies, though they are many as the sands of the sea. Have I answered you now! Come!"
The intonation of the words, rather than their meaning, laid their own solemnity on him; he read
