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262 his presence. The thought seemed wild to him, baseless and vain even to madness; he told himself that it was a presumptuous folly, and he felt that her gentleness to him, her smile upon him, were only such feeling as a woman might well testify, in mere pity's sake, to one whom she had found in deadly peril, and whom she had restored to life on the very brink of the grave. And, indeed, there was a weary, royal grace always in her, which would have made a man, far vainer than Erceldoune could ever become, long doubt his own power ever to move her heart.

He asked nothing, heeded nothing, doubted nothing. He moved, acted, spoke, almost as mechanically as one in the unconsciousness of fever. It was love of which men have died before now; not of broken hearts, as poets say, but of its intoxication and its reaction, as in a death-draught of opium or digitalis.

She divined well enough all that was unuttered on his lips. She let his idolatry be fostered by all of scene, time, place, and the spells of her own loveliness that a studied coquette could have devised, yet she repressed any expression of that worship as a woman of the world alone can do, without any word that was cold, any glance