"Then thou—then the Viracochas can love?" she faltered, after a pause.
Cristoval turned quickly. "Can love, child!" he exclaimed. "Why, what dost think us? Men without souls?"
"But I mean _love_, Cristoval," she said, with timid earnestness. "The love that is not cruel, and merciless, and savage, like that of the Viracochas at Caxamalca; nor yet—" She hesitated, and dropped her eyes.
"Nor yet?" asked Cristoval, bending forward.
"Nor yet?" he persisted. "What wouldst say?"
Her eyes fell once more. "Nor yet," she murmured, "the love that is all unselfishness, like that of a father for his child. Oh, Cristoval, I know not what I would say, but there was in the song what I thought the Viracochas could not feel."
He replied impetuously: "Thou hast thought that? Thou hast dreamed we could not love? Shall I tell thee how we can love? We can worship, Ñusta Rava, and yet, hopeless, be silent until death were happiness."
She regarded him in wonder. "Hopeless, Cristoval?" she asked, in a voice so low that he barely heard it, and the question threw him off his guard. He answered it quickly and desperately, and in giving voice to the torture of his soul for weeks, forgot to be impersonal.
"Hopeless!" he repeated, turning away again. "How else? What art thou?—a princess. And I?—" He stopped. When he looked again his eyes met that in hers which a lover should be willing to give his life to see. Darkened by the moonlight, they regarded him with strange, intent abstraction, serious, gentle, and ineffably fond. This time Cristoval did not turn away. He must have been more than human—or less—to have turned away.
For an instant, as a drowning man reviews a lifetime, he had a hundred thoughts of deprecation, each a stab. He spurned them. The dross of common things faded into due perspective. The world’s cares and dangers grew shadowy. His hands sought hers. As they yielded, the deep eyes deepened, and her lips parted with a sigh, almost a sob.
The _tinya_ had slipped to the ground at their feet. Rava unclasped her hands from his neck and drew back her head to look into his eyes. "Ah, Cristoval, then thou canst love?—truly, thou canst love, and dost love me?"
Cristoval kissed the upturned lips and eyes and brow. "God knoweth I love thee, Rava, and have loved thee long. I had not purposed to tell thee."