You would not guess what it meant--you, to
whom each day has brought its restful round; who have lived only to be
good and reflect the sunshine upon all near you. And I--your slave,
suppose me, standing beside you--might guess as little."
He took a step and touched her hand. His face was still turned to the
window.
"Time! time!" he went on in a low voice, charged with passion. "It
eats us all! Brr--how I hate it! How I hate the grave! There lies the
sting, Mademoiselle--the torture to be a captive: to feel one's best
days slipping away, and fate still denying to us poor devils the chance
which even the luckiest--God knows--find little enough." He laughed,
and to Dorothea the laugh sounded passing bitter. "You will not
understand how a man feels; how even so unimportant a creature as I
must bear a sort of personal grudge against his fate."
"I am trying to understand," said Dorothea, gently.
"But this you can understand, how a prisoner loves the sunshine: not
because, through his grating, it warms him; but because it is the
sunshine, and he sees it. Mademoiselle, I am not grateful; I see
merely, and adore. Some day you shall pause by this window and see a
cloud of dust on the Fosse Way--the last of us prisoners as they march
us from Axcester to the place of our release; and, seeing it, you shall
close the book upon a chapter, but not without remembering"--he
touched her hand again, but now his fingers closed on it, and he raised
it to his lips,--"not without remembering how and when one Frenchman
said, 'God bless you, Mademoiselle Dorothea!'"
Dorothea's eyes were wet when, a moment later, Narcissus came bustling
through the atrium with a roll of papers in his hand.
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