He drew a deep breath, but he did not speak, though the colour rose slowly to his cheek.  And slowly his eyes devoured her from head to foot, from the hands lying white in the light below the window to the shod feet; unchecked he took his fill of that which he had so much desired—­the seeing her!  A woman prone, with all of her hidden but her hands:  a hundred acquainted with her would not have known her.  But he knew her, and would have known her from a hundred, nay from a thousand, by her hands alone.

What was she doing here, and in this guise?  He pondered; then he looked from her for an instant, and saw that while he had gazed at her the sun had set, the light had passed from the top of the hill; the world without and the room within were growing cold.  Was that the cause she no longer lay quiet?  He saw a shudder run through her, and a second; then it seemed to him—­or was he going mad?—­that she moaned, and prayed in half-heard words, and, wrestling with herself, beat her forehead on her arms, and then was still again, as still as death.  By the time the paroxysm had passed, the last flush of sunset had faded from the sky, and the hills were growing dark.

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.

“Water!” he muttered.  “Water!”

She fetched it hurriedly, and, raising his head on her arm, held it to his lips.  He drank, and lay back again with closed eyes.  He lay so still and so long that she thought that he had fainted; but after a pause he spoke.

“You have done that?” he whispered; “you have done that?”

“Yes,” she answered, shuddering.  “God forgive me!  I have done that!  I had to do that, or—­”