Suddenly she was shaken by a rapturous tremor that seemed almost like swooning or being lifted on some powerful wave that swept her clear of the earth, so that she made no effort at disguise, but let the laughing light in her eyes become softer, yet more glowingly intense.
It was as if they had met in the free realm of dreams where there are no hamperings of impossibility. As he drew near her, his arms came out, and he 152 halted so that, under that same delightful sense of irresponsibility, it seemed to her quite natural to step into their welcome.
Possibly the happenings of yesterday and the sleepless hours of last night had left Spurrier momentarily light-headed. Certainly had one of the rattlers stung him and poisoned his reason, he could not be doing a thing more foreign to his program of intention.
He felt his arms close about her; felt the fragrance of her breath, found himself pressing his kisses on lips that welcomed them, and forgot everything except that this was a moment of ecstasy and passion.
CHAPTER XII
For a while they stood there together in the narrow road to whose edges the dense greenery came down massed and dewy. Their breath was quick with the excitement of that moment when the hills and the rocks that upheld them seemed to them palpitant and gloriously shaken. Then they heard the lumbering of wheels, and with one impulse that needed no expression in words they turned through a gorge which ran at right angles into the stillness of the woods—and away from interruption.
Spurrier had, it seemed to him, stepped through a curtain in life and found beyond it a door of which he had not known. It seemed natural that he and Glory should be going hand in hand into that place of dreams like children at play and hearing joyous voices that were mute and nonexistent in the world of commonplace and fact.
He did not even pause to reflect that this was a continuation of the same ravine in which an assassin’s bullet had once so narrowly missed him. Yesterday, too, was forgotten.