She strove to command herself: “Whether you do or not can’t make any difference,” she returned steadily. “We are separated by everything. There’s a gulf between us. It never can be crossed. We should both of us be wretched if it ever were crossed.”
He had risen from the bench and caught her hand: “It’s because we haven’t crossed it we’re wretched,” he said determinedly. “Cross it with me now!” He caught her in his arms. She struggled to escape. She knew what was coming and fought to keep her face from him. With resistless strength and yet carefully as a mother 248 with an obstinate child, he held her slight body against his breast, relentlessly drawing her head closer. “Let me go!” she panted, twisting her averted head from the hollow of his arm. Drinking in the wine of her frightened breath, he bent over her in the darkness until his pulsing eagerness linked her warm lips to his own. She had surrendered to his first kiss.
He spoke. “The gulf’s crossed. Are you so awfully wretched?”
They sank together down on the bench. “What,” she faltered, “will become of me now?”
“You are better off now than you ever were, Nan. You’ve gained this moment a big brother, a lover you can drag around the world after you with a piece of thread.”
“You act as if I could!”
“I mean it: it’s true. I’m pledged to you forever––you, to me, forever. We’ll keep our secret till we can manage things; and we will manage them. Everything will come right, Nan, because everything must come right.”
“I only hope you are not wrong,” she murmured, her eyes turned toward the sombre mountains.