"I am faint, Pelleas; hold me in your arms." "They are strong, Igraine." "There, let me rest so, for ever. Look, the stars are coming out, and there is the moon flooding silver over the trees. My lips burn, and I am faint." "Courage, courage, dear heart." "How close you hold me! I could die so." "What is death to us, Igraine?" "Or life?" "God in heaven, and heaven on earth." "Your words hurt me." XI How the birds sang that evening as a saffron afterglow fainted over the forest spires, and when all was still with the hush of night how the cry of a nightingale thrilled from a tree near the cottage! The glamour of the day had passed, and now what mockery and bitterness came with the cold, calculating face of the moon. Igraine tossed and turned in her bed like one taken with a fever; her brain seemed afire, her hair like so much flame about her forehead. As she lay staring with wide, wakeful eyes, the birds' song mocked her to the echo, the scent of honeysuckle and rose floated in like a sad savour of death, and the moonlight seemed to watch her without a quaver of pity. Her heart panted in the darkness; she was torn by the thousand torments of a troubled conscience, wounded to tears, yet her eyes were dry and waterless as a desert. Gorlois's face seemed to glare down at her out of the idle gloom, and she could have cried out with the fear that lay like an icy hand over her bosom. Pelleas slept under the cedar tree, wrapped in an old cloak, relic of Garlotte's father. How Igraine's heart wailed for the man, how she longed for the touch of his hand! God of heaven, she could not let him go again, and starve her soul with the old cursed life. His lips had touched hers, his arms had held her close, she had felt the warmth of his body and the beating of his heart. Was all this nothing--a dream, a splendid phantasm to be rent away like a crimson cloud? Was she to be Gorlois's wife and nothing more, a bitter flower growing under a gallows, sour wine frothing in a gilded cup? God of heaven, no! What had the world done for her that she should obey its edicts and suffer for its tyrannies? Gorlois had cheated her of her liberty, let him pay the price to the fates; what honour, indeed, had she to preserve for him? If he was a brute piece of lust, a tyrant, a demagogue, so much the better, it would ease her conscience. She owed no fealty, no marriage vow, to Gorlois. Her body was no more his than was her soul, and a dozen priests and a dozen masses might as well marry granite to fire. How could a fool in a cape and frock by gabbling a service bind an irresponsible woman to a man she hated more than the foulest mud in the foulest alley? It was a stupendous piece of nonsense, to say the least of it. No God calling himself a just God could hold such a bargain holy.