e made
broken words of love, and of thanks to Heaven that he had been saved
alive for her, while her hands still fluttered to his face and beat
gently and quickly on his shoulders and his arms, as if fearing lest he
should turn to incorporeal light, without substance under her touch, and
vanish then in air, as happiness does in a dream, leaving only pain
behind.

But at last she threw back her head and let him go, and her hands
brushed away the last tears from her grey eyes, and she looked into his
face and smiled with parted lips, drinking the sight of him with her
breath and eyes and heart. One moment so, and then they kissed as only
man and woman can when there has been death between them and it is gone
not to come back again.

Then memory returned, though very slowly and broken in many places, for
it seemed to her as if she had not been separated from him a moment, and
as if he must know all she had done without hearing her story in words.
The time had been so short since she had kissed him last, in the little
room beyond: there had been the minutes of waiting until the King had
come, and then the trying of the door, and then the quarrel, that had
lasted a short ten minutes to end in Don John's fall; then the half hour
during which he had lain unconscious and alone till Inez had come at the
moment when Dolores had gone down to the throne room; and after that the
short few minutes in which she had met her father, and then her
interview with the King, which had not lasted long, and now she was with
him again; and it was not two hours since they had parted--a lifetime of
two hours.

"I cannot believe it!" she cried, and now she laughed at last. "I
cannot, I cannot! It is impossible!"

"We are both alive," he answered. "We are both flesh and blood, and
breathing. I feel as if I had been in an illness or in a sleep that had
lasted very long."

"And I in an awful dream." Her face grew grave as she thought of what
was but just passed. "You must know it all--surely you know it
already--oh, yes! I need not tell it all."

"Something Inez has told me," he replied, "and some things I guess, but
I do not know everything. You must try and tell me--but you should not
be here--it is late. When my servants know that I am living, they will
come back, and my gentlemen and my officers. They would have left me
here all night, if I had been really dead, lest being seen near my body
should send them to trial for my death." He laug