It was the evening of the following day. Jean, tucked up on a couch and with her strained ankle comfortably bandaged, had been reluctantly furnishing Blaise with the particulars of her experience at the bungalow. She had been very unwilling to confide the whole story to him, fearing the consequences of the Tormarin temper as applied to Burke. A violent quarrel between the two men could do no good, she reflected, and would only be fraught with unpleasant results to all concerned—probably, in the end, securing a painful publicity for the whole affair.
Fortunately Blaise had been out when Judith had rung up earlier in the day to inquire if Jean had returned to Staple, or he might have fired off a few candid expressions of opinion through the telephone. But now there was no evading his searching questions, and he had quietly but determinedly insisted upon hearing the entire story. Once or twice an ejaculation of intense anger broke from him as he listened, but, beyond that, he made little comment.
“And—and that was all,” wound up Jean. “And, anyway, Blaise”—a little anxiously—“it’s over now, and I’m none the worse except for the acquisition of a little more worldly wisdom and a strained ankle.”
“Yes, it’s over now,” he said, standing looking down at her with a curious gleam in his eyes. “But that sort of thing shan’t happen twice. You’ll have to marry me—do you hear?”—imperiously. “You shall never run such a risk again. We’ll get married at once!”
And Jean, with a quiver of amusement at the corners of her mouth, responded meekly:
“Yes, Blaise.”
The next minute his arms were round her and their lips met in the first supreme kiss of love at last acknowledged—of love given and returned.
There is no gauge by which those first moments when two who love confess that they are lovers may be measured. It is the golden, timeless span when “unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday” cease to hem us round about and only love, and love’s ecstasy, remain.