"No, wait." She came to him and put her hands on either side of his face, very gently, and she said, "I love you, in spite of everything. I don't know why. My mind keeps telling me all the reasons why I shouldn't, but—it's a queer thing, Michael. I've never been in love before. Will you have me on those grounds?"
He held her this time, tight against him, and his lips brushed over hers as he answered, "Life with you won't be any haven of peace, I'm sure. But I knew that when I found you."
Standing with her in the gloom, the sea-wind rumpling her white robe and tumbling her hair, memory tricked him back to that night on the Breton beach, centuries ago. So far and far he had come since then, and yet of it all that was almost his clearest memory.
He knew now, with a wisdom that he had not had before, that it would always be so with a man—that it was not the conflicts and the pain and the triumph, not the empires and the stars and the struggles that the memory clung to the longest. It was the little things, the sound of a girl's laughter, the cry of birds on the sea-wind, the flare of a long-ago sunset, that a man held, that he would always hold, when everything else was gone.