She smiled, and moved her face toward him. He took her once more to their former seat, and continued to hold her in his arms as if she were a child.
"I feel better now," she murmured. "It was nothing, Tom. You fell asleep, and I held your head until I toppled over—that was all. Were you frightened?"
"I thought you were dead," he repeated, deeply awed by the grim spectre so foreign to his experience.
"And did you care so very much?" she ventured, her heart beginning to beat high again. For answer he gently raised her cheek to his and held her close. There was no need of words to tell her how much he was moved, for he had never held her thus before. Through her lover's strange moods of fierce tenderness and stern denial she had won her way at last, as she now believed, to a perfect understanding. He could not live without her; it was merely a question of time.
His continued tenderness gave her reason to believe that this assurance was justified. Only at the gate, when he bade her good-night, did he seem to be seized once more in the grip of contending emotions. He started to go without a word or kiss, then, turning back, he took her in his arms with a grip that hurt, calling her his Lena, his little girl, his wife. The last word broke from him with an intensity that caused the blood to riot in her heart, a joy that was shot through with wondering fear of the passion she had aroused.
When his figure had disappeared in the darkness, she left the gate and entered the kitchen through the low window which the cook had left unlocked against her coming. She lighted a candle, and looked at herself curiously in a mirror that hung on the wall. The grain of the cheap glass distorted her features, but reflected faithfully her heightened colour and the drops that sparkled like jewels in her light hair. Apparently she was satisfied with the inspection, for she smiled happily, and then went slowly upstairs to her narrow room beneath the roof.
Meanwhile, Emmet was striding along the gleaming street, regardless of the increasing rain that soaked him to the skin. From time to time he shot out his arm violently, as if he would push back some invisible foe, or would extricate himself from the meshes of a net that was closing in upon him. Again, he swore aloud, as one who curses a malign and unmerited fate.