"Tell me, Stelio, what can I do for thee?"
She imagined some marvelous test, some unheard-of proof of love. "Let me serve! Let me serve!" cried her heart. She yearned to own the whole earth, that she might offer it to him.
"What dost thou wish? Tell me--what can I do for thee?"
"You should possess one with strength equal to your own."
"But it is you, and only you, that each day increases my strength and exalts my hope. My blood runs quicker when I am near you in your mystic silence. At those times things are born in my brain that in time you will marvel to see. You are necessary to me."
"Each day you confirm me in the assurance that all promises made to me will be kept."
"Yes, you will have your own beautiful destiny. For you I have no fear; you are sure of yourself. No peril can surprise you, no obstacle can impede your progress. Oh, to be able to love without fear! One always fears when one loves. It is not for you that I fear. You seem to me invincible. I thank you for that also."
She showed him her faith, deep as her passion, lucid and unlimited. For a long time, even in the heat of her own struggles and the vicissitudes of her wandering life, she had kept her eyes fixed on this young, victorious existence, as on an ideal form born of the purification of her own desire. More than once, in the sadness of vain loves and the nobility of the prohibition imposed between them, she had thought: "Ah, if, some day, from all my courage, hardened in many storms, from all the strong, clear things that grief and revolt have revealed in the depths of my soul, from the best of myself, I could fashion for thee the wings that shall bear thee upward in thy last supreme flight!" More than once, her melancholy had been dissipated in a heroic presentiment. And then she had subjected her soul to restraint, had raised it to the highest plane of moral beauty that she could, had guided it in paths of purity, solely to merit that for which she hoped and feared at once--to be worthy of offering her servitude to him who was so impatient to conquer the world.
And now a sudden violent shock of Fate had thrown her before him in the guise of a mere weak woman, overcome by earthly passion. She had united herself to him by the closest tie; she had watched him at dawn, sleeping; she had had sudden awakenings, alarmed by cruel fear, and had found it impossible to close her tired eyes again, lest he should gaze on her while she slept, and see in her face the lines of care and years.
