"Tell me that you are mine," he whispered.
She did not answer for a moment. Then she lifted her eyes. He drank their light as a thirsty man might drink waters of life. Neither spoke. The rustling wind passed whispering. The June dark enveloped them in the warm caress of the night. By the dim flare of the library lamp he saw her lips trembling.
"Tell me," he commanded.
"Do I need to tell you?"
"Yes, yes! I must have a seal of memory for the dark future," and his tongue poured forth such utterances as he had not dreamed men could use but in prayer. "I must know from your own lips."
He felt the tremor, felt the two hands rise to frame his face, felt the catch and take of breath, heard the broken notes of gold.
"Then, take it," she said.
He bent over her lips in an exquisite torture that could neither give nor take enough till she struggled to free herself, when he crushed her the closer, and kissed the closed eyes and the forehead and the hair and the pulsing throat. Then he opened his arms.
She sank on the morris chair and hid her face in her hands. They neither of them spoke nor heard very much but the pounding of their own hearts. Wayland gazed out in the dark at the shiny flood-tides of the river. She had not meant—she had meant always to be free; she had not meant to mingle her life currents in the destiny of others.
The door opened suddenly. It was old Calamity, red-shawled and stooping.