“It’s nothing,” he said hastily, but with compressed lips. “I must have wrenched it when I tumbled. How awkward of me!”
“It was I who frightened your horse; and no wonder, when I jumped up right under his feet.”
“And in that cloak, too!” he said, his eye noting the buoyancy of her beauty and its grace of curve.
The rebellious waves of her brown hair had filched rosy lustres from her garb, and the blood painted her cheeks with a stain like wild moss-berries. Her eyes chained his own. She had not yet released his hand, but was touching it with the purring regard of a woman for an injured pet. The allurement of her physical charm seemed to him to pass from her finger-tips like pricklings of electricity from a Leyden jar.
Daunt shook off her hand with an uncontrollable gesture, and with his one arm still thrust through the bridle, drew her close to him and kissed her—kissed her hair, her forehead, her half-opened eyes, her mouth, her throat, her neck.
She felt his lips scorch through her cloak. He dropped upon his knees, still holding her, and showered kisses upon the rough folds of her gown.
“Margaret!” he cried, “you know why I have come! You know what I want! I want you! Forgive me, but I couldn’t stay away. Do you suppose I thought you meant what you said in those letters? Why should you run away from me? Why did you leave me as you did? What is the matter?”
As he looked up at her, he saw that the light had died out of her eyes. Her lips were trembling. Her face was marked by lines of weariness. She repulsed him gently and went back a few steps, gazing at him sorrowfully.
“You shouldn’t have come,” she said then. “You ought to have stayed away! You make it so hard for me!”
“Hard?” His voice rose a little. “Don’t you love me? Have you quit caring for me? Is that it?”