"I'm not preaching," he protested. "I'm asserting that no amount of bigotry can white-wash a living sepulcher."
"I told you I wanted to be alone.... I told you—" Her voice broke. "I told you that I must be alone."
"You defied me to attack when and where and how I chose," came his instant rejoinder. "I'm fighting for your salvation from the undertow."
His eyes met hers and held them under a spell like hypnosis, and hers were wide and futile of concealment so that her heart and its secrets were at last defenseless.
"I—I will go back to the house," she said, and for the first time her voice openly betrayed her broken self-confidence.
"Can you go?" he challenged with a new and fiery assurance of tone. "Don't you know that I can hold you here, without a word, without a touch? Don't you realize that I can stretch out my arms and force you, of your own accord, to come into them?"
She seemed striving to break some spell of lethargy, but she only succeeded in swaying a little as she stood pallid and wraith-like in the moonlight. Her lips moved, but she failed to speak.
"I will never leave you again." Farquaharson's voice leaped suddenly with the elation of certain triumph. "Because you are mine and I am yours. I said once with a boy's assurance that they might surround you with regiments of soldiers but that I would come and claim you. Now I've come. There is no more doubt. Husband or lover—you may decide—but you are mine."
Her knees weakened and as she tried to retreat before his advance she tottered, reaching out her hands with a groping uncertainty. It was then that he caught her in his arms and crushed her close to him, conscious of the wild flutter that went through her soft body; intoxicated by the fragrant softness of the dark hair which he was kissing—and at first oblivious to her struggle for freedom from his embrace.