He kissed her, and then: "This is nothing but madness—and my work, too," he added, bitterly—"my work."
She put her fingers on his lips.
"You take too much credit. It wasn't you who said, 'All mankind is under a sentence of capital punishment.' It isn't as if we could escape, you know."
The old sense of all the ways being barred, of being a creature trapped, lay heavy on him.
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he said, with a weary laugh, "we ought to be less rational, or more so. You think you love me, little girl?"
He laid his hands about her throat, and as he looked into the face his senses swam again. She neither spoke nor moved, but the quick, bright scarlet was in her cheek, and all her womanhood was in her eyes.
"This leaping of the importunate blood," he thought, "all this heartache, because of the will to live of that creature who is never to be born; the spirit of the race, heedless of 'compacts,' clamoring for reincarnation."
"If life's as terrible and strange as you say," Val whispered, drawing a little away, "and if this life's all, why, it's as clear as daylight, we'd be less than rational, we'd be stark mad, to let our little day of happiness go by. You see"—she crept closer to him again in the failing light, half crying—"it concerns only us. We'll live our perfect day, and when the evening comes we'll lie down—"
"In each other's arms," he said, hiding his face in her loosened hair, his tortured mind turning with passion to the image of ultimate peace.
"Yes." Sobbing faintly, she drew away that she might see his face. His voice had sounded strangely. "This is our compact," she said, and she kissed him on the lips.