She was in his arms the same second, laughing and crying with the strange conflict of new and inexplicable emotions.
"I want to be with you here, and forever. Heaven frightens me now. But—oh, Spinny, dear protecting thing, I want—I also want—" She broke off abruptly, and Spinrobin, unable to see her face buried against his shoulder, could not guess whether she was laughing or weeping. He only divined that something in her heart, profound as life itself, something she had never been warned to conceal, was clamoring for comprehension and satisfaction.
"Miriam, tell me exactly. I'm sure I shall understand—"
"I want Winky to be with us always—not only sometimes—on little visits," he heard between the broken breathing.
"I'll tell him—"
"But there's no good telling him," she interrupted almost fiercely, "it is me you must tell…."
Spinrobin's heart sank within him. She was in pain and he could not quite understand. He pressed her hard against him, keeping silence.
Presently she lifted her face from his coat, and he saw the tears of mingled pain and happiness in her eyes—the eyes of this girl-woman who knew not the common ugly standards of life because no woman had ever told them to her.
"You see, Winky is not really mine unless I have some share in making him too," she said very softly. "When I have made him too, then he will stay forever with us, I think."
And Spinrobin, beginning to understand, knowing within him that singular exultation of triumphant love which comes to a pure man when he meets the mother-to-be of his firstborn, lowered his own face very reverently to hers, and kissed her on the cheeks and eyes—saying nothing, and vaguely wondering whether the awful name that Skale sought with so much thunder and lightning, did not lie at that very moment, sweetly singing its divinest message, between the contact of this pair of youthful lips, the lips of himself and Miriam.