She went to the window and opened the shutter. The ineffable sacred pureness of another dawn came in, gray, tranquil, penetrating.
At the sight of it, the dear light of everyday, Marise felt the thankful tears come to her eyes.
"See, Agnes," she said in an unsteady voice, "daylight has come. You can look around for yourself, and see that there is nothing to be afraid of."
CHAPTER XXVI
MARISE LOOKS AND SEES WHAT IS THERE
A Torch in a Living Tree
July 24.
Not since his fiery, ungovernable youth had Vincent felt anything like the splendid surge of rich desire and exultant certainty which sent him forward at a bound along the wood-road into which he had seen Marise turn. The moment he had been watching for had come at last, after these three hideous days of sudden arrest and pause. The forced inaction had been a sensation physically intolerable to him, as though he had been frozen immobile with every nerve and muscle strained for a great leap.
He felt himself taking the leap now, with such a furious, triumphant sense of power released, that he came up beside her like a wind in the forest, calling her name loudly, his hands outflung, his face glowing, on fire with joy and his need for her.
For an instant he was dumfounded by the quiet face she turned on him, by his instant perception of a profound change in her, by an expression in her long dark eyes which was new to him, which he felt to be ominous to him. But he was no untried boy to be cast down or disconcerted by sudden alterations of mood in a woman. He was a man, with a man's trained tenacity of purpose and experienced quickness of resource.