But the Carlats and her women learned from the guards below what was passing; and quaking and cowering in their corners fixed frightened eyes on her, who was their stay and hope.

How could she prove false to them?
How doom them to perish, had there been no question of her lover?
Of him she sat thinking by the hour together.

She recalled with solemn tenderness the moment in which he had devoted himself to the death which came but halfway to seize them; nor was she slow to forgive his subsequent withdrawal, and his attempt to rescue her in spite of herself.
She found the impulse to die glorious; the withdrawal--for the actor was her lover--a thing done for her, which he would not have done for himself, and which she quickly forgave him.

The revulsion of feeling which had conquered her at the time, and led her to tear herself from him, no longer moved her much while all in his action that might have seemed in other eyes less than heroic, all in his conduct--in a crisis demanding the highest--that smacked of common or mean, vanished, for she still clung to him.

Clung to him, not so much with the passion of the mature woman, as with the maiden and sentimental affection of one who has now no hope of possessing, and for whom love no longer spells life, but sacrifice.
She had leisure for these musings, for she was left to herself all that day, and until late on the following day.