The Faun's Transformation

"And my eyes bade you do it!" repeated she.

They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if
some inestimable treasure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable.
On the pavement below was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or
nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched
out, as if they might have clutched for a moment at the small square
stones. But there was no motion in them now. Miriam watched the heap of
mortality while she could count a hundred, which she took pains to do.
No stir; not a finger moved!

"You have killed him, Donatello! He is quite dead!" said she. "Stone
dead! Would I were so, too!"

"Did you not mean that he should die?" sternly asked Donatello, still in
the glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him. "There
was short time to weigh the matter; but he had his trial in that breath
or two while I held him over the cliff, and his sentence in that one
glance, when your eyes responded to mine! Say that I have slain him
against your will,--say that he died without your whole consent,--and,
in another breath, you shall see me lying beside him."

"O, never!" cried Miriam. "My one, own friend! Never, never, never!"

She turned to him,--the guilty, bloodstained, lonely woman,--she turned
to her fellow criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had
drawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a
clinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror
and agony of each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind of
rapture.