And his arms were round her, and for one second she clung close to him as he kissed her.
Then, even while his fire burned close to her, so that it mingled with her own blaze, and while the ringing of the music that was mystically one with it drowned all other sound, the real world, the actual world, which had quite vanished from her consciousness, stood round her again, menacing, reminding, appalling. Her real self, her integrity, her honour pointed at her in amazement, in horror, so that through their eyes, and not through the eyes of her passion, she saw herself and what she was doing, and what she was permitting, and what she was rapturously welcoming. Memory, loyalty, honesty cried aloud at her, and though it seemed that she was tearing part of herself away she wrenched herself free.
"Oh, what are we doing?" she cried. "We are both mad! And you——Oh, why did you let me? Why did you make it possible for me? Let me go, Edward!"
He had seized her again.
"I can't!" he said. "You are mine, and you know it! It's you that I have dreamed of all my life! We both dreamed, and we have awoke to-night to find it is true!"
Again, and this time easily, she shook herself free of him, for that in him which had struggled before, which had planned this evening as a farewell to her, came to her aid. For the moment, Elizabeth, far stronger than he in will, was wholly against him, and against him he had honourable traitors in his own house.
"We dreamed to-night of impossible things," she said; "and I have awoke again."
She began to tremble violently as the struggle to maintain that first flush of true vision seized her. It had come to her with the flashing stroke of impulse; now—and here was the difficulty—she had to keep hold of it.
"Edward, you see it as I do really!" she said. "You know we've been mad, mad! Ah, thank God, here we are!"
The motor had stopped by the hotel door, and already a porter was coming across the pavement to it.