accept so worthless a gift--a life I value not at all save for one
unique memory which I owe to you."

I knew she was looking at me while I swung open the door with a low bow.
I did not trust myself to look at her. An unreasonable disenchantment,
like the awakening from a happy dream, oppressed me. I felt an almost
angry desire to seize her in my arms--to go back to my dream. If I had
looked at her then, I believed I could not have controlled myself.

She passed out; and when I looked up there was O'Brien booted and
spurred, but otherwise in his lawyer's black, inclining his dapper
figure profoundly before her in the dim gallery. She had stopped short.
The two maids, huddled together behind her, stared with terrified eyes.
The flames of their candles vacillated very much.

I closed the door quietly. Carlos was done with the earth. This had
become my affair; and the necessity of coming to an immediate decision
almost deprived me of my power of thinking. The necessity had arisen too
swiftly; the arrival of that man acted like the sudden apparition of
a phantom. It had been expected, however; only, from the moment we
had turned away from Carlos' bedside, we had thought of nothing but
ourselves; we had dwelt alone in our emotions, as if there had been no
inhabitant of flesh and blood on the earth but we two. Our danger had
been present, no doubt, in our minds, because we drew it in with every
breath. It was the indispensable condition of our contact, of our words,
of our thoughts; it was the atmosphere of our feelings; a something
as all-pervading and impalpable as the air we drew into our lungs. And
suddenly this danger, this breath of our life, had taken this material
form. It was material and expected, and yet it had the effect of an evil
spectre, inasmuch as one did not know where and how it was vulnerable,
what precisely it would do, how one should defend one's self.

His bow was courtly; his gravity was all in his bearing, which was quiet
and confident: the manner of a capable man, the sort of man the great
of this earth find invaluable and are inclined to trust. His full-shaven
face had a good-natured, almost a good-humored expression, which I have
come to think must have depended on the cast of his features, on the
setting of his eyes--on some peculiarity not under his control, or else
he could not have preserved it so well. On certain occasions, as this
one, for instance, it affected me as a refinement of cynicis