into her eyes and rain kisses on the lids still dark with grief for his
death. Sight could not believe the sight, hearing could not but doubt
the sound, yet her hands held him and touched him, and it was he, unhurt
saving for a scratch and a bruise. In her overwhelming happiness, she
had no questions, and the first syllables that her lips could shape 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