I dared not ask her to forget, she would have found it an insult. I
could not tell her then who and what I was. She was weeping, and I had
but to dry her tears.
"Shall a man not come back to the loveliest lady in all the wide world?"
said I. "A thousand Michaels should not keep me from you!"
She clung to me, a little comforted.
"You won't let Michael hurt you?"
"No, sweetheart."
"Or keep you from me?"
"No, sweetheart."
"Nor anyone else?"
And again I answered:
"No, sweetheart."
Yet there was one--not Michael--who, if he lived, must keep me from
her; and for whose life I was going forth to stake my own. And his
figure--the lithe, buoyant figure I had met in the woods of Zenda--the
dull, inert mass I had left in the cellar of the hunting-lodge--seemed
to rise, double-shaped, before me, and to come between us, thrusting
itself in even where she lay, pale, exhausted, fainting, in my arms, and
yet looking up at me with those eyes that bore such love as I have never
seen, and haunt me now, and will till the ground closes over me--and
(who knows?) perhaps beyond.
CHAPTER 12
I Receive a Visitor and Bait a Hook
About five miles from Zenda--on the opposite side from that on which
the Castle is situated, there lies a large tract of wood.
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