“All good lovers are,” he answered, drawing her into his arms once more with a sudden, swift jealousy. “Don’t you know that? It’s the very essence of love—possession, A man asks everything of the woman he loves—past, present, and future. He will he satisfied with nothing less.”
The words, uttered with an undercurrent of deep passion, struck a familiar chord in Ann’s mind. They were like, and yet unlike, something she had heard before. For a moment she puzzled over it, the connection eluding her. Then, all at once, it flashed over her, and she remembered how Brett Forrester had said: “The past doesn’t matter to me. It’s the future that counts.” These two men, Eliot and Brett, loved very differently, she thought! With Brett, love meant a passionate determination to possess the woman he desired whether she surrendered willingly or with every fibre of her spirit in revolt. But to Eliot, love signified something deeper and more enduring. He wanted all of the woman he would make his wife—soul as well as body, past as well as future, the supreme gift which only a woman who loves perfectly can give and which only a man whose love is on the same high plane should dare to ask.
“I should never be content with less,” Eliot went on. “I think if you were ever to fail me, Ann—” He broke off abruptly, as though the bare idea were torture.
“But I shan’t fail you!” she replied confidently. “I love you”—simply. “And when one loves, one doesn’t fail.”
His arms tightened their clasp about her till she could feel the hard beating of his heart against her own.
“Heart’s dearest!” he murmured, his lips against her throat.
Presently she lifted her head from his shoulder and regarded him with questioning eyes.
“You didn’t tell me what would happen to me if I did fail you?”
“Don’t speak of it!” he said sharply.
“But it’s just as well to know the worst,” she persisted laughingly. She felt so sure—so safe—with his arms round her that she could afford to joke a little about something that could never happen. “Would you cut off my head—as Bluebeard cut off the heads of his wives?”