But how different this one, as always, had been! To preserve inviolate the spirit of our love, she had gone forward to meet what must to a sensitive nature like hers have been a time of horror and terror, absolutely alone, unsupported except by the thought that I was away, free, unable to share her misery!
With gifts in both hands she had come to me and laid them all in mine. Then, when I had broken my trust and brought distress upon her, when she was in need and I could have been the one to give, she had fled away from love, from consolation, from any return or reparation. Proud, courageous, independent, untamable, as she had always been, she was in comparison with other women as a lioness is to a gazelle.
I folded my arms round her tighter at these thoughts, for the lioness was mine and I owned her.
Perhaps, after all, it was worth while to suffer that agony of self-reproach I had just now, and was suffering still, to see put in such shining light before me her courage and her worth.
This was a white night, surely, as the others had been coloured, for as white is the blending of all the colours into one, so in this night all the emotions of those previous nights were blended. Passion, jealousy, triumph, and an agony like death had all swept over me in these few short hours, and now from them all, blent together and burning as metals in a smelter, rose up the extreme white vivid flame of love for her like the white silken tongue of fire, the last degree of fiercest heat that the smelter can produce.
I bent over her, looking down into her eyes, deep down into those living depths where I seemed to see the rays of an eternal heaven, clasping the smooth breast to me, closely, that its passionate heart-beats might answer my own, and in our veins burnt that intense white flame that melts into itself the glory of the immortal Spirit, the wonder of the hereafter, and all the joys of the world.