“But I’ll say it. I’ll tell you how I love you.”
He took her in his arms. She was a thin, dark woman, with large eyes; her flesh firm and her caresses melting. As she turned her head a little he could see, beneath the half-closed and palpitant pupils, that look of black and gold in which all the voluptuous anguish of the season and the hour were reflected.
“How little she seems against my breast,” he thought, as he clasped her to him; “a little thing, yet more to me than all the world.” Aloud he murmured:
“I love you, Edith.”
“Really?” she said, with her same purposed smile.
“When will you be mine?”
“When I can be only yours.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“Why?
“You are bound.”