With a cry, almost rough in its intensity, he caught her in his arms and buried his face in the soft harvest of her hair. "Jasmine—Jasmine, my love!" he murmured.
Suddenly she broke from him. "Oh no—oh no, Ian! The work is not done. I can't take my pay before I have earned it—such pay—such pay."
He caught her hands and held them fast. "Nothing can alter what is. It stands. Whatever the end, whatever happens to the thing I want to do, I—"
He drew her closer.
"You say this before we know what Moravia will do; you—oh, Ian, tell me it is not simply gratitude, and because I tried to help you; not only because—"
He interrupted her with a passionate gesture. "It belonged at first to what you were doing for me. Now it is by itself, that which, for good or ill, was to be between you and me—the foreordained thing."
She drew back her head with a laugh of vanity and pride and bursting joy. "Ah, it doesn't matter now!" she said. "It doesn't matter."
He looked at her questioningly.
"Nothing matters now," she repeated, less enigmatically. She stretched her arms up joyously, radiantly.
"The world well lost!" she cried.