“No; but you are it,” Gavan murmured.
She held him in the stern, untender clasp, her head drawn back from him, while, slowly, seeking her words over the tumult she subdued, she said: “It’s you I want—not your unwilling longing, not your unwilling love. I want you so that I can be really myself; I want you so that you can be really yourself.”
He strained her to him, hiding his face on her breast.
“Can’t you live? Can’t you be—if I help you?” she asked him.
For a long time he was silent, only pressing closely to her as though to hide himself from her questions—from his own thoughts.
He said at last: “I can’t think, Eppie. Your words go like birds over my head. Your suffering, my longing, hurt me; but it’s like the memory of a hurt. I am apart from it, even while I feel it. Even while I love you—oh, Eppie! Eppie!—I don’t care. But when we are like this—at last like this—I am caught back into it all, all that I thought I’d got over forever, this afternoon,—all the dreadful dream—the beautiful dream. It’s for this I’ve longed—you have known it: to hold you, to feel your breath on me, to dream with you. How beautiful you are, how sweet! Kiss me, Eppie,—darling, darling Eppie!”
“I will not kiss you. It would be real to me.”
He had raised his head and was seeing now the suffering of her shadowy eyes, the shadowy lips she refused him tragically compressed lest they should tremble. Behind her pale head and its heavy cloud of hair were the white roses giving out—how his mind reeled with the memory of it—the old, sweet, wine-like fragrance.
He closed his eyes to the vision, bending his lips to her hand, saying: “Yes, that’s why I wanted to spare you—wanted to run away.”
In the little distance now of his drawing from her, even while he still held her, his cheek on her hand, she could speak more easily.