“Michael, you are a bully!” she protested indignantly, half angry with him.
“Then you’ll stay there?” he persisted.
“You don’t give me much choice”—twisting her shoulders restlessly beneath his hands.
He laughed a little.
“You haven’t answered me.”
“Well, then—yes!”
She almost flung the word at him, and instantly she felt him lift his hands from her shoulders and heard his footsteps as he tramped out of the cabin and up on to the deck. Presently he returned, carrying the blankets which he had wrapped round her earlier in the course of their vigil. Magda accepted them with becoming docility.
“Thank you, Wise Man,” she said meekly.
He stood looking down at her in the faint moonlight that slanted in through the open door of the cabin, and all at once something in the intentness of his gaze awakened her to a sudden vivid consciousness of the situation—of the hour and of her absolute aloneness with him. Their solitude was as complete as though they had been cast on a desert island.
Magda felt her pulses throb unevenly. The whole atmosphere seemed sentient and athrill with the surge of some deep-lying emotion. She could feel it beating up against her—the clamorous demand of something hardly curbed and straining for release.