“Think so?” he challenged. “Go on and bite! Bite hard!”
The blazing gray eyes burned up into the steely blue ones. Breast to breast, body to body, they stood, their eyes welded together. She made to move her head, but the motion died. Still their eyes clung. And then something happened.
How, why, what it was neither knew—perhaps a subtle opening of some hitherto unknown chamber of the heart. But the fire died from the gray eyes, the chill melted from the blue ones; and something else crept into their unswerving gaze. For unmeasured minutes the man and the girl stood in silence.
Then his arms slowly loosened. Swaying a little, she stepped away.
“I—you—nobody never hugged me like that before,” she whispered, as if unconscious of her words. “I’m—I’m dizzy, seems like.”
“I’m sorry,” he muttered.
“I ain’t,” she breathed. Wide-eyed, she stared up as if seeing a man for the first time in her life: as if some fairy wand had swept from before her a veil through which she had regarded men as creatures little more interesting than any other common animals. “Why—why are you sorry?”
He made no answer. His gaze dropped and rested absently on the pencil-lined paper which had brought it all about.
“Why did you—let me go?” she asked.
“I was thinking of—Steve,” was his slow reply.