Darius breathed savagely hard through his clenched teeth, and rising suddenly, paced the pavement between Nehushta and the fountain.  She was silent still, overcome with a sort of terror at his words—­words, every one of which he was able to fulfil, if he so chose.  Presently he stood still before her.

“Said I not well, that I rave as a madman—­that I speak as a fool without understanding?  What can I give you that you want?  Or what thing can I devise that you have need of?  Have you not all that the world holds for mortal woman and living man?  Do you not love, and are you not loved in return?  Have you not all—­all—­all?  Ah! woe is me that I am lord over the nations, and have not a drop of the waters of peace wherewith to quench the thirst of my tormented soul!  Woe is me that I rule the world and trample the whole earth beneath my feet, and cannot have the one thing that all the earth holds which is good!  Woe is me, Nehushta, that you have cruelly stolen my peace from me, and I find it not—­nor shall find it for evermore!”

The strong dark man stood wringing his hands together; his face was pale as the dead, his black eyes were blazing with a mad fire.  Nehushta dared not look on the tempest she had roused, but she trembled and clasped her hands to her breast and looked down.

“Nay, you are right,” he cried bitterly.  “Answer me nothing, for you can have nothing to answer!  Is it your fault that I am mad?  Or is it your doing that I love you so?  Has any one sinned in this?  I have seen you—­I saw you for a brief moment standing in the door of your tent—­and seeing, I loved you, and love you, and shall love you till the heavens are rolled together and the scroll of all death is full!  There is nothing, nothing that you can say or do.  It is not your fault—­it is not your sin; but it is by you and through you that I am undone,—­broken as the tree in the storm of the mountains, burned up and parched as the beast perishing in the sun of the desert for lack of water, torn asunder and rent into pieces as the rope that breaks at the well!  By you, and for you, and through you, I am ruined and lost—­lost—­lost for ever in the hell of my wretched greatness, in the immeasurable death of my own horrible despair!”

With a wild movement of agony, Darius fell at Nehushta’s feet, prostrate upon the marble floor, and buried his face in the skirts of her mantle, utterly over-mastered and broken down by the tumult of his passion.

Nehushta was not heartless.  Of a certainty she would have pitied any one in such distress and grief, even had the cause thereof come less near to herself.  But, in all the sudden emotion she felt, the pity, the fear, and the self-reproach, there was joined a vague feeling that no man ever spoke as this man, that no lover ever poured forth such abundant love before, and in the dim suspicion of something greater than she had ever known, her fear and her pity grew stronger, and strove with each other.