"Oh, dear Jack," she pleaded—but I would not be stopped, and words stumbled over each other in my agony to persuade her.
"It's Fate—your destiny! I can't change it, neither can you! It spoke to us beneath our two big pines on the Oasis; it's speaking to-night—saying you shall never leave me!"
"Oh, but Jack, that's so impossible! He'll make me go!"
I saw the glitter of tears upon her cheeks, and answered fiercely:
"He can't, when I love you as I do!"—and whispered over and over: "Sweetheart, sweetheart, I love you!"
She had not moved. The moon, by this time high enough to have mustered its forces, frosted the yacht into the semblance of a dream-ship, and we might, indeed, have been sailing upon some phantom lake in fairyland. My eyes were pleading for hers until she raised them—and then they could not turn away. Held and blended by a mesmeric force, they began to give and answer question for question, secret for secret. I saw the quick pulsations in her throat, which seemed to be beating in my veins, instead.
"Oh, Jack," she whispered, laughing tremulously, with a subdued madness that was made for such a night as this, "let me go back to Echochee!"
But I could only answer as I had before:
"I love you—I love you!"
"Darling, darling Jack," she begged, taking my cheeks in her palms, "you mustn't—you really mustn't! Let me go, dear!—Oh, I believe my throne is—is tottering!"