"But—" she began.
"Oh, Elizabeth, what do we care for what they call right and wrong?
'Right' is being together!"
She frowned in a puzzled way. She had not been thinking of "right and wrong"; her mind had been absorbed by the large and simple necessity of death. But his inevitable reasonableness, ignoring her organic impulse, was already splitting hairs to justify an organic impulse of his own.
"God gave you to me," he said, "and by God I'll keep you! That's what is right; if we parted now it would be wrong."
It seemed as if the gale of passion which had been slowly rising in him in these hours they had been together blew away the mists in which her mind had been groping, blew away the soothing fogs of death which had been closing in about her, and left her, shrinking, in sudden, confusing light.
"Wrong?" she said, dazed; "I hadn't thought about that. David, I wouldn't have come to you except—except because it was the end. Anything else is impossible, you know."
"Why?" he demanded.
"I am married," she said, bewildered.
He laughed under his breath. "Blair Maitland will take his own medicine, now," he said;—"you are married to me!"
The triumph in his voice, while it vaguely alarmed her, struck some answering chord in her mind, for while mechanically she contradicted him, some deeper self was saying, "yes; yes."