Never had he needed a mother as now, Jane felt, as she bent her energy toward his tired spirit. He needed more than a mother; his feverish driving unrest would quiet, in arms that held him closer than a mother's might. The time had come for her to be mother to him, and something else. Winner or not, he was a hearty fighter ... decent.... Jane Lauderdale Judson ... the name meant something now; she had helped it mean something. A tired boy; her tired boy....
He looked up into her face at last. Her eyes, radiant with unspoken caresses, were a madonna's ... twin stars over a fretted sea; twin stars, in a heaven so near that he could reach and touch it. Unsteadied, he swung painfully to a seat beside her. Then, compelled by her dominant eyes, he turned and faced her in the shadowy hush. Unsteadily he put out his two arms, touching her lightly, fearfully, upon the shoulders, and lingering there. The pressure of his fingers drew her toward him; a pressure from no visible fingers pushed him inexorably toward her. He felt her breast touch him softly, and settle contentedly against him. He pressed his flushed face against the soft neck and the tendrils of her hair; his lips lay against her flesh, although he did not dare move them.
There was an unhurried rapture of stirless content. Half solaced for the moment, he released her; but his eyes could not leave hers, nor his face move far from her own.
Her clear voice came to him quietly, with the mellow reverberations of a gong touched in dusky stillness. "Stupid...." He could not read the half-closed eyes; he had to lean closer to make out the words. "Is that all?... Must I ask you?..."
His lips touched hers, closed upon them, clung there. A giddy faintness came with the long-withheld ardor; his eyes shut out sight, the other senses ceased for the moment—the frantic remnant of his will and consciousness seeking to make the moment perpetual. His own being seemed to flow out and into the other, he seemed to absorb from the vital contact all of the inestimable dearness that she meant to him. This consummation, devoutly unwished for so long, was for that reason in its realization doubly dear; it brought an ecstasy so brimming that for the time no other sensation found space to obtrude.
Too soon, to his heart, the ecstatic eternity ended. Suddenly ashamed of her daring in permitting the tardy rapture, not to think of inviting it, Jane drew back, releasing her tingling lips into a prim pucker of uncertainty. He sought her a second time, quickened to an arrogant sense of ownership of intangible wonders. Her protest reached him: "We shouldn't, Pelham dear...."
She found her lips too busied to frame more negative commandments, despite her unevenly ebbing struggles of protest.
At length his sense of protection returned; dizzily he leaned back, unstrung, and yet satisfied. The night noises pulsed a rhythm fuller, more harmoniously triumphant with soft surges of loving certainty, than he had ever felt; the pandering darkness was intimate and confidential. With the slowing of the unleashed leap of his blood, recollections of Louise Richard came, as he had once feared; but there was no conflict, no sense of soilure, in the unreal, remote fantasy of the former passion; only a sun-high glory and delight in this, as if the first had been the needed soil in which the plant of love could grow toward fulfillment.
Her ears caught his contented whisper. "What are a thousand defeats, Jane ... loved one ... when there is this at the end of the way?"
"At the beginning of our new way," she amended with sober joy.