She drew herself closer to him with a long, tremulous sigh.
"I'm a coward," she murmured. "I'm shaking so that I can't stand." She tried to draw herself away—or did she only make pretense to him and to herself that she was trying?—then relaxed again into his arms.
The thunder cracked and crashed; the lightnings leaped in streaks and in sheets; the waters gushed from the torn clouds and obscured the light like a heavy veil. She looked up at him in the dimness—she, too, was drunk with the delirium of the storms raging without and within them. His brain swam giddily. The points of gold in her dark eyes were drawing him like so many powerful magnets. Their lips met and he caught her up in his arms. And for a moment all the fire of his intensely masculine nature, so long repressed, raged over her lips, her eyes, her hair, her cheeks, her chin.
A moment she lay, happy as a petrel, beaten by a tempest; a moment her thirsty heart drank in the ecstasy of the lightnings through her lips and skin and hair.
She opened her eyes to find out why there was a sudden calm. She saw him staring with set, white face through the rain-veil. His arms still held her, but where they had been like the clasp of life itself, they were now dead as the arms of a statue. A feeling of cold chilled her skin, trickled icily in and in. She released herself—he did not oppose her.
"It seems to me I'll never be able to look you—or myself—in the face again," he said at last.
"I didn't know it was in me to—to take advantage of a woman's helplessness."
"I wanted you to do what you did," she said simply.
He shook his head. "You are generous," he answered. "But I deserve nothing but your contempt."
"I wanted you to do it," she repeated. She was under the spell of her love and of his touch. She was clutching to save what she could, was desperately hoping it might not be so little as she feared. "I had the—the same impulse that you had." She looked at him timidly, with a pleading smile. "And please don't say you're sorry you did it, even if you feel so. You'll think me very bold—I know it isn't proper for young women to make such admissions. But—don't reproach yourself—please!"