"Is it distrusting you to ask you to marry me?"
"Not this way would you have asked that of me when I last came! But I will answer you more honestly than you do me. To go with you would be the greatest happiness the world could give. To think of it dazzles the heart. But it is not for me. Have you forgotten, Roger, that my life is not mine? That I am a prisoner who has crept out for a little while? The gates soon close, now, upon me."
"What gates?" I demanded.
"Sacrifice and expiation."
"Expiation of what?" I exclaimed, exasperated. "Desire, I have read the book of Desire Michell, downstairs."
I heard her gasp and shrink in the darkness. Silence bound us both. In the hush, it seemed to me that the house suddenly trembled as it had done the night before, a slight shock as from some distant explosion. In my intentness upon the woman opposite me the tremor passed unheeded. She must answer me now, surely! Now——
She spoke with a breathless difficulty, spacing her words apart:
"How did you—find—the book?"
"It told me—the Thing from out there," I admitted, sullenly defiant of her opinion.
She cried out sharply.