With feminine persistency she clung to the subject, detecting his
unwillingness to discuss a possible final stage in their sufferings.

"Robert!" she whispered fearfully, "you will never let me fall into the
power of the chief, will you?"

"Not whilst I live."

"You _must_ live. Don't you understand? I would go with them to
save you. But I would have died--by my own hand. Robert, my love, you
must do this thing before the end. I must be the first to die."

He hung his head in a paroxysm of silent despair. Her words rung like a
tocsin of the bright romance conjured up by the avowal of their love.
It seemed to him, in that instant, they had no separate existence as
distinguished from the great stream of human life--the turbulent river
that flowed unceasingly from an eternity of the past to an eternity of
the future. For a day, a year, a decade, two frail bubbles danced on
the surface and raced joyously together in the sunshine; then they were
broken--did it matter how, by savage sword or lingering ailment? They
vanished--absorbed again by the rushing waters--and other bubbles rose
in precarious iridescence. It was a fatalist view of life, a dim and
obscurantist groping after truth induced by the overpowering nature of
present difficulties. The famous Tentmaker of Naishapur blindly sought
the unending purpose when he wrote:--

"Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate,
And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road;
But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate.