"To tell your mother."
She felt a contraction of the arm embracing her, as though a throb of pain had stiffened it.
"I shall never tell any one," he said abruptly; but as he felt in her a responsive shrinking he gathered her close again, whispering through the hair that fell about her cheek: "Don't talk, dear...let us never talk of it again...." And in the clasp of his arms her terror and anguish subsided, giving way, not to the deep peace of tranquillized thought, but to a confused well-being that lulled all thought to sleep.
XXXVII
But thought could never be long silent between them; and Justine's triumph lasted but a day.
With its end she saw what it had been made of: the ascendency of youth and sex over his subjugated judgment. Her first impulse was to try and maintain it—why not use the protective arts with which love inspired her? She who lived so keenly in the brain could live as intensely in her feelings; her quick imagination tutored her looks and words, taught her the spells to weave about shorn giants. And for a few days she and Amherst lost themselves in this self-evoked cloud of passion, both clinging fast to the visible, the palpable in their relation, as if conscious already that its finer essence had fled.
Amherst made no allusion to what had passed, asked for no details, offered no reassurances—behaved as if the whole episode had been effaced from his mind. And from Wyant there came no sound: he seemed to have disappeared from life as he had from their talk.
Toward the end of the week Amherst announced that he must return to Hanaford; and Justine at once declared her intention of going with him.
He seemed surprised, disconcerted almost; and for the first time the shadow of what had happened fell visibly between them.