Many
a night he woke trembling from dreams of anguish. There were three
dreams which came again and again--one was of the morning when she
galloped past him in the narrow lane with the strange look in her eyes,
and he never dreamed it without a nightmare sense of mad despair and
loss from which his own wild cry to her would wake him; another was of
the night she passed him on the stair, and did not see him. Oh, God
(for 'twas in this wise the dream always came), she did not see him.
She passed him by again. And there was left only the rose lying at his
feet. And he should never see her face again! And one was of the night
he spent in his room alone at Dunstan's Wolde--the night when he had
torn the laces from his throat that he might breathe, and had known
himself a frenzied man--while her happy bridegroom to be had slept and
dreamed of her.
From such dreams he would waken with an unreasoning terror--a
nightmare in itself--a sense that even now, even when both were free
and he had seen that in her eyes his soul sought for and cried out
to--even now some Fate might come between and tear them apart, that
their hearts should never beat against each other--never! And, in
truth, cold sweat would break forth on his body and he would spring
from his bed and pace to and fro, lighting the tapers that he might
drive the darkness from him.
"Naught shall come between!" he would cry.
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