Desire Michell was beside me, and I could not rise or answer her. She bent over me, so that the Rose of Jerusalem fragrance inundated me and drove back the sickening air that was the breath of our enemy.
"Let me go," she sobbed, her head beside my head. "If you can hear me, listen and leave me as It wills. You know now that I belong to It by heritage? You know why we can never be together as you planned? Try to feel horror of me. Put me away from you. No evil can come to me unless I seek evil. But It will not suffer you to take me. Live, dear Roger, and let me go."
"Yield to me, Man, what you may not keep," the whisper of the Thing followed after her voice. "Would you take the witch-child to your hearth? Cast her off; and taste my pardon."
"Can you hear, Roger? Roger, let me go."
With an effort terrible to make as death to meet, I broke from the paralysis that chained me. As from the drag of a whirlpool, I tore myself from the tide-clutch, from the will of the Thing, from the numb weakness upon me. For a moment I thrust back the hand at my throat. I stood up and drew Desire up with me in my arms, both of us reeling with my unsteadiness.
"I do not give you up," I said, my speech hoarse and difficult. "I claim you, now, and after. And my claim is good, because I pay."
Desire exclaimed something. What, I do not know. Her voice was lost in the triumphant conviction that I was right. She was free, and the freedom was my gift to her. I was not vanquished, but victor. The life I paid was not a penalty, but a price.
Her face was uplifted to mine as she clung to me; then my weight glided through her arms and I fell back in my chair.
I was alone amid blackness and desolation that poured past me like the wind above the world.