She clung to me a little comforted.
"You won't let Michael hurt you?"
"No, sweetheart."
"Or keep you from me?"
"No, sweetheart."
"Nor anyone else?"
And again I answered:
"No, sweetheart."
Yet there was one—not Michael—who, if he lived, must keep me from her; and for whose life I was going forth to stake my own. And his figure—the little, buoyant figure I had met in the woods of Zenda—the dull, inert mass I had left in the cellar of the shooting lodge—seemed to rise, double-shaped, before me, and to come between us, thrusting itself in even where she lay, pale, exhausted, fainting, in my arms, and yet looking up at me with those eyes that bore such love as I have never seen, and haunt me now, and will till the ground closes over me and (who knows?) perhaps beyond.
