An age--it seemed--she lay there
shivering in her flimsy lawn against the cold sheets, her eyes not quite
closed, watching the flicker of the firelight. She did not think--could
not--just lay stiller than the dead. The door creaked. She shut her
eyes. Had she a heart at all? It did not seem to beat. She lay thus,
with eyes shut, till she could bear it no longer. By the firelight she
saw him crouching at the foot of the bed; could just see his face--like
a face--a face--where seen? Ah yes!--a picture--of a wild man crouching
at the feet of Iphigenia--so humble, so hungry--so lost in gazing. She
gave a little smothered sob and held out her hand.
II
Gyp was too proud to give by halves. And in those early days she gave
Fiorsen everything except--her heart. She earnestly desired to give that
too; but hearts only give themselves. Perhaps if the wild man in him,
maddened by beauty in its power, had not so ousted the spirit man, her
heart might have gone with her lips and the rest of her. He knew he was
not getting her heart, and it made him, in the wildness of his nature
and the perversity of a man, go just the wrong way to work, trying to
conquer her by the senses, not the soul.
Yet she was not unhappy--it cannot be said she was unhappy, except for a
sort of lost feeling sometimes, as if she were trying to grasp something
that kept slipping, slipping away.
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