"And leave behind you all that you have hitherto thought so much about, Zara?" I asked, brought back by her statement to a realization of the conditions by which we were surrounded. She replied without hesitation, and with a finality that was complete:
Ah, what maps of the world have been changed by that word yes. What histories have been written because of its utterance, even in a whispered tone, as hers was then.
"And your nihilists?" I asked her, still intent upon an even more complete capitulation on her part.
"And your brother? The cause you have served so intently? The purpose of your life? Everything, Zara?"
"Yes," she said a third time, and still with that same emphasis of finality which could not be misunderstood, and for which there was no qualification.
I was silent and so was she; but after a little I heard her murmuring in a tone so low that it seemed as if I scarcely heard it, notwithstanding the fact that every word was quite distinct.
"I will leave everything for you, my love, for you are all the world to me. There is nothing else now, but you. Nihilism and the cause it upholds, has sunk into utter insignificance, and has become a mere point in the history of my life, like a punctuating period that is placed at the end of a written sentence. Nihilists, great and small, have become mere atoms in the mystery of creation, and they can have no further influence upon my life. The czar of all the Russias is no more a personage to me now, than the merest black dwarf of central Africa, and Russia itself has diminuated to a mere island in the sea of eternity, a speck on the map of the infinite creation. You, Dubravnik----" She paused there and smiled into my eyes with an inimitable gesture of tenderness as she reached upward with her right hand and brushed back the hair from my temples--"I think I shall always call you Dubravnik. The name is yours, as I have known you, and as Dubravnik you are mine, as I am yours."
My reply to this was not a spoken word, and it needs no explanation.
"You, Dubravnik," she continued from the point where she so sweetly interrupted herself, "have become the universe to me, now. You are the infinite space which comprehends all."
It was sweet to hear her express herself so; sweeter still to know, that comprehensive as it was, it went but a little way toward explaining all that she would have liked to say; and sweetest of all to realize that she also exactly expressed my thought toward her, and that she knew she did so.