CHAPTER XXXVI.
HIS KINGDOM.
Count Hannibal could not have said why he did not speak to her at once. Warned by an instinct vague and ill-understood, he remained silent, his eyes riveted on her, until she rose from the floor. A moment later she met his gaze, and he looked to see her start. Instead, she stood quiet and thoughtful, regarding him with a kind of sad solemnity, as if she saw not him only, but the dead; while first one tremor and then a second shook her frame.
At length “It is over!” she whispered. “Patience, Monsieur; have no fear, I will be brave. But I must give a little to him.”
“To him!” Count Hannibal muttered, his face extraordinarily, pale.
She smiled with an odd passionateness. “Who was my lover!” she cried, her voice a-thrill. “Who will ever be my lover, though I have denied him, though I have left him to die! It was just. He who has so tried me knows it was just! He whom I have sacrificed—he knows it too, now! But it is hard to be—just,” with a quavering smile. “You who take all may give him a little, may pardon me a little, may have—patience!”
Count Hannibal uttered a strangled cry, between a moan and a roar. A moment he beat the coverlid with his hands in impotence. Then he sank back on the bed.
