“I told you the sunrise did things to me,” he laughed. And something trembled in her. Was he beginning? Would he never begin? There was no reservation in the flooding tide of the love she had for him. Now that she knew it for what it was, she could not hold it back. And—his eyes were hers. She was in them; she could see herself in them. It was not that he did not care.
“You’re cold,” he said, looking at her in a way she could not understand. She shook her head.
“No, no, don’t talk about me,” she answered. Her guards were down with that; she felt that she had laid herself open. She had betrayed herself by that appeal. She dared not look at him.
Dan watched her; and then he said huskily: “I want to talk about you.”
She could no longer think, no longer wonder, no longer fight. She could only hold her tongue, pray that he might not guess she wished him to go on. Whether he guessed or not, he did go on. “Will you let me? Don’t be—angry, if I do.”
She said through stiff lips: “See! There’s the sun!”
He did look where she pointed, long enough to glimpse the first red rim above the distant sea. Then his eyes swept back to her. He said:
She was furiously impatient with him. Why was the man so slow? “Please what?” she asked.
He had one of her hands; she had not known that. He kissed it, in a hurried, fumbling, unskilled way. She said: “Oh, you said you liked to do this to women—when the sun—That’s all it is.”