The pent-up, exasperated longing of months broke out in six words.
"Look at me, you little demon! look at me——"
But even now she did not look; how could she, when she had shut her eyes before the change that had come into his own?
He caught her to him. With his one arm slung about her, he put a scorching kiss upon her throat, under her ear. Then he took her chin in his hand and turned her face round; he kissed the childishly red mouth until little Olwen, all shy and aflame, felt that the shape of his own would be moulded upon her lips.
For all his theorizings, his protestations, his boastings about Love, he was yet a lover ... or perhaps it would be truer to say a lover at last.
As for her.... The whole of her girl's nature seemed to stretch out gleeful hands to the gift that he made to her—of herself. Till now she had resembled—what? The sea-anemone that for weary hours of low-tide has waited self-contained and folded into itself upon its rock, an inert lump.... At last the warm waves rise, and lo! the rosy fingers spread to welcome its own element have turned it to a lovely thing, a star-shaped flower of flesh.
Into her sigh of delight he heard her murmur, "No! I mustn't——"
"Mustn't what?" muttered the strange voice of him who was no longer the Captain Ross of this story, but the Fergus of their love-tale that was beginning.
And in Love, after all, all's well that begins well. (Even though there was no real "proposal" after all.)
He coaxed, "Mustn't what, Honey?"