For an instant he hated her, fiercely, impotently. The next, he put his hand gently upon her shoulder and kissed her cheek.
III
That kiss dated naturally a new era in their relations; not outwardly at first, to an appreciable extent, but with a difference immense in implication, in understanding.
Terence, forced to stay at Wallingford a day longer than he had intended, tried to put the added time to profit.
He saw that the chief danger lay in the hazy country of her expectations.
Her life had been turned upside down with joy, its dulness was on fire with an undreamed-of satisfaction; and she neither knew nor cared what might come next, so long as it kept the flame that was lit in her alive.
She lived for the unexpected, and she would show no discrimination in accepting it. Everything in that land was so new to her that no one thing seemed more alien than another; nothing had a special air of peril or of safety, of warning or of promise: all things were equally and perturbingly improbable, and supreme.
Terence realized how vague suddenly had become all her boundaries of conduct, and desired without delay to fix a frontier beyond which neither of them should go.
He would withdraw from nothing that his kiss had even seemed to promise; but he wished to put what it had not inalterably beyond her reach.