"Val"—he averted his face—"you must try to understand. The barrier between you and me is a real one. It's not a question of whether your father's views were right or wrong, but that our imaginations have been infected by them. I, at least, would always be fearing, expecting disaster, and the fear would bring the evil to pass. Or even if it didn't, the fear would—would destroy us."
"No, no!"
"It's true. I have no courage equal to facing either my family inheritance, or my own dread of life—in a little child." He threw off her clinging hand. "Think of any one feeling as I do about life, thrusting it on another—on some one I would love as I would love your—" He dropped his head and covered his eyes with his hand.
"Why do you think always of some possible other person? Why do you never think of me?" she cried.
He made a sudden movement, dropping his hand on the gunwale of the boat, and looking straight into her eyes, with something new in the mobile face, something that inundated, drowned her in one hot flush of passion.
"Oh!" she cried, half closing her eyes, "do you care like that?" and she drooped forward into his open arms.
"Like this and like this," he said, kissing her fiercely. "Oh, my love! my love! why have you infected me? Why have you poured yourself into my very blood?" He had taken her by the shoulders almost roughly, arraigning her with sombre-burning eyes. "You put that face of yours in all my dreams. I go to sleep with it on my pillow; I wake up, it still is there. In the blackest night I see you as I saw you first, standing above the darkness, holding a great light in your hand. But the light is not to light my way. Get you back into your fortress as quickly as you can." He pushed her from him. "I am the enemy."
"'Enemy,' 'coward'—I've another name for you," she said, trembling; "and if I have any light, it surely is for you. Dear Ethan, don't you see? Don't you see?"
"See?" The moody eyes were heavy with passion.
"It's all quite clear." She sat before him in the bottom of the boat, with hands clasped, and a veiled exaltation in her eyes. "We must make a compact. We Ganos are honest people; we'll play fair."