He took her hand and drew her into the thick-wooded path, in under the cool green shadows, gold-sprinkled with the magic of the sun’s morris-dance of little elfin light-fairies. New strength seemed to flood him. His heart, beginning to beat quickly, flushed his face with hot blood. Something as yet unawakened, something potent, atavistic, something that had its roots twined far into the past, surged through his veins.
“Come on, Laura!” he repeated. “Come on, I’ll show you the way!”
Half an hour had passed before they stood upon the summit. They had perhaps lingered a bit more than needful, even with so many leaves and flowers to pick and study over; and, moreover, part of the way their progress had been really difficult. Hal had carried her in his arms up some of the more dangerous pitches—carried her quite as if she had been a child. The clinging of her arms to his shoulders, the warmth and yielding of her, the blowing of her hair across his face, the faint perfume of her alluring femininity had kindled fires that glowed from his eyes—eyes like the eyes of Alpheus Briggs in the old days when the Malay girl had been his captive. Yet still the atavisms in him had been stifled down. For Hal was sober now. And still the metes and bounds of civilization and of law had held the boy in leash.
Thus they had reached the summit. Far up past the diving-ledge they had made their way, and so had climbed to the little sheltered nook facing the sky.
“I think you’re wonderful, Laura!” Hal said as he pressed aside the bushes for her to enter the grassy sward. His voice was different now; his whole manner had subtly altered. No longer words of college argot came to his lips. “I think you’re really very wonderful! There’s not another girl in this town who’d take a risk like this!”
“It’s nothing, Hal,” she answered, looking up at him in the sunshine with a smile. “I told you before I couldn’t possibly be afraid where you were. How could I be afraid?”
“Lots of girls would be, all the same,” said he. “You’re just a wonder. Well, now, let’s go over there to the edge. I won’t let you fall. I want you to see the view. Just through that fringe of birches there you’ll see it.”
With quickened breath the girl peered down through the trees, at land and sea spread far below, while Hal’s arm held her from disaster. Branches and twigs had pulled at her, in the ascent. Her voile dress showed a tear or two; and all about her face the disordered hair strayed as the sea-breeze freshened over the top of Geyser. The boy kept silence that matched hers. A kind of vague, half-realized struggle seemed taking place in him—a conflict between the sense of chivalry, protecting this woman in his absolute power, and the old demon-clutch that reached from other days and other places.
Now, though his thoughts and hers lay far apart as the world’s poles, each felt something of the same mysterious oppression. For the first time quite alone together, up there aloft in that snug, sun-warm nest embowered in greenery, a kind of mystic and half-sensed languor seemed to envelop them; a yearning that is older than old Egypt; a wonder and a dream.
Hal’s arm tightened a very little ’round her body. She felt it tremble, and, wondering, understood that she, too, felt a little of that tremor in her own heart. She realized in a kind of half-sensed way that more dangers lay here than the danger of falling from the cliff. Yet in her soul she knew that she was glad to be there.