Page:Anthony Hope - The Kings Mirror.djvu/141

 to show the singularly unfortunate manner in which they made what they felt manifest; my object is not to blame what was probably inevitable in them, but to show how they overreached themselves and became not a drag on my infatuation, as they hoped, but rather a spur that incited my passion to a quicker course.

That spur I did not need. She seemed to stand before me still as I had left her, with my kiss fresh on her cheeks, and on her lips that strange, nervous, helpless laugh, the laugh that admitted a folly she could not conquer, expressed a shame that burned her even while she braved it, and owned a love so compact of this folly and this shame that its joy seemed all one with their bitterness. But to my younger heart and hotter man's blood the folly and shame were now beaten down by the joy; it freed itself from them and soared up into my heart on a liberated and triumphant wing. I had achieved this thing—I, the boy they laughed at and tried to rule. She herself had laughed at me. She laughed thus no more. When I kissed her she had not called me Cæsar; she had found no utterance save in that laugh, and the message of that laugh was surrender.