The two white arms came together and folded over him and drew him in like wings.
Time and the world were nothing to her then; time and the world were shut out from him. It was the lingering, long-delayed capitulation of the more impetuous, profounder love she had held back from him, of the finer and softer self she had all but famished in the citadel of her grim aspirations. She no longer allured him, or cared to allure him; she had nothing to seek of him thereafter; she had only the ruins of her broken life to give him.
And he, too—he felt those first thin needles of bliss that crept and projected themselves over the quiet waters of friendship, and he knew that a power not himself was transforming those waters of change and unrest and ebb and flow into the impenetrable solidity of love itself.
CHAPTER XXVI
AUTUMN SUNLIGHT
There we watched those troubled eyes,
And her laughing face grow wan;
And the birds sought other skies,
And she knew her year—was gone!
John Hartley, "The Valley Princess."
This dog of a life—mongrel of joy and misery that it is!—"The Silver Poppy."