He seemed to have forgotten her, to be
speaking instead to his own heart, as he said, very low, his voice
touched with the tenderness of unrelinquished dreams: "To have had one
hour--just one perfect hour, and then the memory of that untarnished
forever--it would be enough."
Her heart rushed passionately to its own defence; she wanted to tell him
no! She wanted to tell him it was cruel to be permitted to live for a
time in a beautiful country, only to be turned out into the dark. She
wanted to tell him that to know love was to need it forever. But his head
had fallen to his hand; he seemed entirely lost to her, and even now she
knew his answer to what she would say. "But you _had_ it," he would
reply. "The cruel thing would be to awaken and find no such country had
ever existed." They would get no closer than that, and with new
passionateness her heart went out to Karl. Karl would understand it as it
was to her!
He too felt that they could come no closer than this. They sat there in
the gathering twilight with their separate thoughts as souls sit together
almost in the dark, seeing one another in shadow, across dim spaces.
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