As he sighed out that last word he recollected. Perhaps at that moment Roderick Pym was dead, his revenge had cost him his life; for the count would be a dangerous antagonist, he was a skilled swordsman and a dead shot. “How, when do they fight?” he asked breathlessly, with the instinct to stay that duel at any cost. “Fight!” she spoke almost indignantly. “Do you think I would let the good count kill himself for me—even for _you_?” Tears stood in her eyes. “I knelt and prayed him,” she said. “I begged him, but he would not hear me. He said: ‘Would you have me be a coward?’ Then at last he said to me: ‘If you will promise me that to-morrow you will go home to Spain with the prince, and will never see or speak to _him_ again, I too will go with you, and will sacrifice my _honneur_.’” She paused and hung her head. “So, as I have promised, I have come to say good-bye,” she faltered. Yes; he had known this all along, he felt he had. This was the end—the end of a promised passionate joy—the end of delights of eye and ear—of heart, soul, mind, body—all! “Yes,” he said, meekly bowing his head, “I understand. We part; it is all over for ever.” “Oh no!” she cried, with sudden life, and her face was alight with love and hope, “only for here! You know—who should know better than you?—how short is this life, you who always see the dead and dying! Is it death, that which we call death?” she asked him, passionately. “Do you think it? Do you not rather think that _this_ is dying, this living in a place where you must not love, where people hate and torture each other, and happiness cannot be, for no one will let another one be happy?” He went to her and took her slender, cold hands in his—for the last time. “It does not matter,” he said, bitterly, yet feeling, with a strange joy, that this sacrifice of love ennobled their love, raised it from a common thing to divinity. “No one can separate us after death, if God wills us to be soul to soul—one for ever.” A strange expression flitted across her face. For one instant it seemed to him that this was not Mercedes, but Lilia. Then came the memory of that awful death-bed, when Lilia defied the will of her Creator, and would have forced him, her husband, to die with her, and he contrasted that hour of rebellion with this hour of humble renunciation. “This is _her soul_,” he thought, in mingled awe and gratitude. “Roderick would have caused our misery; instead, he has saved us from an evil life together for here, in this painful world, to be united in eternity.” This was his actual death, he felt, as he silently gazed into her eyes, this parting. Physical death, after this, would be nothing—would, indeed, be welcome. For a moment he thought to take her, just this once, into his arms: to let her heart beat against his breast, to feel her lips upon his mouth; but before the thought was really born in his mind he killed it and flung it from him. “Risk eternity for a moment?” he said to himself. “No!”