You
have no cause to reproach me with lack of faith in you, Randalin, for when
every happening--even your own words--made it appear as if it were love for
Rothgar Lodbroksson which brought you into the camp, I looked into your eyes
and believed them against all else." In the intensity of the living present he
forgot the dead past--until he saw its ghosts troop like gray shadows across
her face.
"Love for Rothgar Lodbroksson?" she repeated, drawing back. "Then you did
believe that I could love Rothgar?" Her voice rose sharply. "You believed that
I followed him!"
Too late he saw what he had done. "I said that I did not believe it," he cried
hastily. "What I thought at first in my bewilderment,--that could not be
called belief." Now it was the present that he had forgotten in the past, as
he strove desperately to recapture the phantoms and thrust them back into
their graves.
But she did not seem to hear his explanation as she stood there gazing at him,
her mind leaping lightning-like from point to point. "It was that which made
you behave so strangely in the garden," she said, and she spoke each phrase
with a kind of breathless finality. "You thought that I--I was like those--
those other women in the camp." As he tried to take her hand she drew farther
away, and stood looking at him out of eyes that were like purple shadows in
her white face.
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