He felt the moment had come that he might say some things he had waited with patience to speak:
"You are sure, dear, that you have utterly forgiven the great wrong I did you?"
"Yes, Dan," she answered simply, "why do you ask?"
"I just want to be sure, my Jean," he said tenderly, "that there's not a single dark corner of your heart in which the old shadows lurk. I want to drive them all out with my love just as we see the sun now lighting with glory every nook and corner of the world. You are sure?"
The thin lips quivered uncertainly and her blue eyes wavered as he searched their depths.
"There's one thing, Dan, that I'll never quite face, I think"—she paused and turned away.
"What, dear?"
"How any man who had ever bent over a baby's cradle with the tenderness and love I've seen in your face for Tom, could forget the mother who gave the life at his command!"
"I didn't forget, dearest," he said sadly. "I fought as a wounded man, alone and unarmed, fights a beast in the jungle. With her sweet spiritual ideal of love a sheltered, innocent woman can't remember that man is still an animal, with tooth and claw and unbridled passions, that when put to the test his religion and his civilization often are only a thin veneer, that if he becomes a civilized human being in his relations to women it is not by inheritance, for he is yet in the zoölogical period of development—but that it is by the divine achievement of character through struggle. Try, dearest, if you can, to imagine such a struggle. This primeval man, in the shadows with desires inflamed by hunger, meets this free primeval woman who is unafraid, who laughs at the laws of Society because she has nothing to lose. Both are for the moment animals pure and simple. The universal in him finds its counterpart in the universal in her. And whether she be fair or dark, her face, her form, her body, her desires are his—and, above all, she is near—and in that moment with a nearness that overwhelms by its enfolding animal magnetism all powers of the mind to think or reflect. Two such beings are atoms tossed by a storm of forces beyond their control. A man of refinement wakes from such a crash of elemental powers dazed and humiliated. Your lips can speak no word as vile, no curse as bitter as I have hurled against myself——"
The voice broke and he was silent. A little hand pressed his, and her words were the merest tender whisper as she leaned close: