"Please!" she went on faintly, after a little silence. "I've promised, and you—you're hurting me still." She moved her wrist with a gentle tug, and he realized all at once that he was still holding her with a merciless, unbreakable grip.
"Alison!" he cried, his fingers instantly unlocking. "I'm sorry!" He looked at her in the moonlight, with eyes grown moist: seeing the forlorn, trembling little figure waiting submissively, feeling the soft appeal of the grave, wistful face that lifted slowly to meet his gaze. A wave of pitying tenderness swept upon him, and there came to him also a feeling of self-contempt, and for a minute he was almost ashamed of his service and the coat he wore. The knowledge that he had been forced to deal ruthlessly, cruelly, with such a woman as Alison Rayne, would always remain a galling remembrance.
He breathed unsteadily as he faced her, and, scarcely knowing what he was doing, he reached about her and circled her yielding shoulders with his arm. "Alison!" he whispered.
With a throbbing gasp the girl swayed towards him and pressed her flushed cheek against his jacket. "I'm tired," she said—"so tired."
For a long space the corporal stood without speech, holding her close, feeling her heart beating, intoxicated by the warmth and nearness of her presence, touching her fragrant hair with his cheek, thrilled to his innermost being by the sweetness of an ineffable moment, dreaming a dream that his reason told him could never come true.
But as he gazed yearningly over the girl's bowed head, he caught a glimpse of a rising star—the Dog Star—creeping up over the southern horizon. It was the star of spring, and it promised the opening of the passes, the speedy coming of comrades from the distant barracks of the police. And as his glance ranged down the shimmering sky, somehow the magical spell was broken, and sanity returned. He caught himself with a shivering movement, and his arm dropped swiftly to his side.
"I think we'd better be going," he said abruptly, with a strange gruffness in his voice. "If you're ready—?"
She averted her face with a quivering sigh, and her eyelids drooped and closed; but after an instant she flung up her head, as though to toss the straying tendrils of hair from her eyes; her shoulders and back straightened, and she turned to Dexter with a cool, inscrutable glance. "Whenever you say," she agreed.
The corporal appreciated the impossibility of going back to Saddle Mountain that night, but he bent his steps northward, with no definite place in view, feeling only the urge to leave this spot, to be on the move, to go somewhere else. He led the way through a scented growth of cedars, along the mountain slope, the girl following meekly at his heels. They had not gone far, however, before he realized how foolish it was to attempt to travel. He was exhausted, almost ready to collapse. Two or three times he slipped in the snow and swayed on his uncertain legs, and each time he managed somehow to recover himself and push onward. Alison pleaded with him to use the support of her shoulder, but he smiled and shook his head. "I'm all right," he insisted.
It was foolish talk, and he knew it. And at last he was forced to give in. They had climbed to a level shelf of ground, screened on all sides by dense brush, and after a wavering glance about him, Dexter decided to call a halt.