She looked up with a passionate darkness in her eyes that startled me.
“Yes,—I know!” was her unexpected answer.
“You do!” and I stopped to gaze intently into her fair face—“And how did you learn?”
She flushed red,—then grew pale,—and clung to me with a nervous, almost feverish force.
“Very strangely!” she replied—“And—quite suddenly! The lesson was easy, I found;—too easy! Geoffrey,”—she paused, and fixed her eyes full on mine—“I will tell you how I learnt it, ... but not now, ... some other day.” Here she broke off, and began to laugh rather forcedly. “I will tell you ... when we are married.” She glanced anxiously about her,—then, with a sudden abandonment of her usual reserve and pride, threw herself into my arms and kissed my lips with such ardour as made my senses reel.
“Sibyl—Sibyl!” I murmured, holding her close to my heart——“Oh my darling,—you love me!—at last you love me!”
“Hush!—hush!” she said breathlessly—“You must forget that kiss,——it was too bold of me—it was wrong—I did not mean it, ... I, ... I was thinking of something else. Geoffrey!”—and her small hand clenched on mine with a sort of eager fierceness—“I wish I had never learned to love; I was happier before I knew!”
A frown knitted her brows.
“Now”—she went on in the same breathless hurried way—“
I want love! I am starving, thirsting for it! I want to be drowned in it, lost in it, killed by it! Nothing else will content me!”