Just now he was young in his heart again, and had love for his talisman. Actuality had been dethroned by some dream wizardry and left him free of obligation to reason. Then he heard Glory’s voice low-pitched and a little frightened.
“It kain’t—can’t—be true. It’s just a dream!”
A flash of sanity, like the shock of a cold plunge, brought the thought that, from her lips, had sounded a warning. This was the moment, if ever, to draw back and take counsel of common sense. Now it would be easier than later to abase himself and confess that in this midsummer’s madness was no substance or color of reality—that he stood unalterably pledged to her renunciation.
But the earthquake does not still itself at the height of its tremor and the cyclone does not stop dead with its momentum unspent. Years of calculated and nerve-trying self-command were exacting their toll in the satisfaction of outbreak. Spurrier’s emotional self was in volcanic eruption, the more molten and lava-hot for the prolonged dormancy of a sealed crater.
He caught the girl again and pressed her so close that the commotion of her heart came throbbing against him through the yielding softness of her breast; and the agitation of her breath on his face was a little tempest of acquiescent sweetness.
“Doesn’t it seem real, now?” he challenged as he released her enough to let her breathe, yet held her imprisoned, and she nodded, radiant-eyed, and answered in a voice half bewildered and more than half burdened with self-reproach.
“I didn’t even hang back,” she made confession. “I just walked right into your arms the minute you held them out. I didn’t seem able to help myself.”
Suddenly her eyes, impenitent once more, danced with mischief and her smile broke like a sun flash over her face.
“If I’d had the power of witchcraft, I’d have put 155 the spell on you, Jack,” she declared. “I had to make you love me. I just had to do it.”