So this nursling of a palace, evidently dying out on the wide sea, with only rough men about her, had neither a word nor a look of reproach for the one who had dragged her forth to so wretched a fate.  Even in her mind’s wanderings, she seldom went back to former pomps or pleasures, and her tongue preferred rather to stumble through the rough and unfamiliar language in which of late she had been so terribly schooled, than to speak that of her youth.  Once, when after a short absence her attendant returned to her side, she said,—­

“My heart was trying to cross the waves that were between us, and oh! how it was tossed upon them—­and it ached, and—­and—­” Then, giving a sigh of relief, she sank back, closed her eyes, and slumbered restfully.

He disposed of the lamp he had just lighted, and then, with an expression as inscrutable as ever, he stood looking down upon her.

While this scene was being enacted, I marked through the open portal of the cabin—­in one of those strange distractions that occur to us amidst the most intense feelings of our lives—­the stars above us growing brighter and brighter as the shades of the twilight deepened.  Suddenly turning from the couch, he also, at a stride, stood in full view of those bright revelations of the darkness; but his eye sought them with no such abstracted regard as mine.  Fixedly and sternly he seemed to be watching among them some portentous index of fate.  Soon a change came over his countenance, and he resumed his place beside the scarcely breathing form.  Then the fountains of the great deep within him were broken up, and the rushing torrent of its emotions shook his whole frame and convulsed his features.  Stooping, he kissed the insensible girl passionately, again and again, and he would, I believe, have clasped her to his bosom if I, fearing for her the effects of his stormy transports, had not caught his arm.  He needed no explanation of my interruption, neither was he startled or incensed by it, and he seemed more like one reluctantly obeying some sudden restraining impulse of his own than yielding to that of another.

“No,” he said, “I must not cut short a single flicker of that bright spirit; the wondrously beautiful vessel that it glorifies will be cold clay soon enough! ashes from which no future Phoenix shall arise.  O,” he exclaimed, “this sacrifice is too great, too great! and for nothing!  Even had she perished on the destined altar, an accepted sacrifice, it were too great!  But I tore her from home and friends, and life itself, for this,—­for nothing!  O Destiny, thou art a subtle adversary, and infinite are thy devices for our overthrow!  But I never reckoned on such an impediment as this heart-weakness.”

Then approaching me, he laid a hand upon my shoulder, and said:  “As the representative of the young, hopeful, living world she is about to leave, I called you here that you and she might look your last upon each other.  Go now, and though your present emotion accords duly with the part I have assigned you, see that you do not play false to it hereafter by letting this woful event impress you with too deep or too lasting a sorrow.”