There were pauses between her sentences.
"Shall you be glad to have me happy with some one else?"
His voice had fallen to the cadence she remembered so well.
"Anything,—anything,—so that you are happy."
She spoke passionately, and she sobbed heavily after her words.
Lawrence drew himself away, as if by command of something outside of himself. Then quickly he came nearer. He put his free arm about her and kissed her; he kissed her again and again, her lips responding to his caress, touching his own as they had done—ah, how long ago was it? It seemed as if time had been annihilated and he was back to that day when she had said she loved him. And how he had loved her!—as the cataract rushes over the cliff; the old trite comparison was the true one. At the meeting of their lips the torrent rushed over his soul again. What did anything matter, so that he had her again? Her arms were about his neck, her face was against his. He heard her say, "Dearest," in the same tone in which she had first spoken it to him, more than two years ago,—the tone he had tried to forget.
"We are not to blame," she said. "We didn't try to meet. It was a blessed chance,—oh, a blessed chance! And now we have met, how can we part?"
She hung upon him. She seemed to have flung from her all the self-control which she knew so well how to maintain.
It was as if her love had mastered all else; Lawrence felt it to be thus. It was love for him, he felt, that was stronger than everything besides. This conviction went to his head; it made him long to forget the present, that was not hers, in that past which had been hers.
And how strange, how unaccountable, that he should have found her in the boat. Was it a blessed chance?