His jealousy rose and he caught hold of her hand that held the envelope. “Look here, you are not to write it if it is to that damned scoundrel. I took you away from him last night and you are never to see him again.”
For the first time the two really looked at each other. Her lips parted as though she would reprove him, and the boy murmured:
“That’s all right. I mean what I say—never to see him again! Will you promise me? Promise me—I can’t bear it! I won’t have it!”
A film of emotion crossed his clear young eyes and her slender hands were held fast in his clasp. His face was beautiful in its tenderness and in a righteous anger as he bent it on her. Instead of reproving him as she had done before, instead of snatching away her hands, she swayed, and at the sight of her weakness his eyes cleared, and the film lifted like a curtain. She was not fainting, but, as her face turned toward his, he saw it transformed, and Dan caught her in her dark dress, the flowers in her bodice, to his heart. He held her as if he had snatched her from a wreck and in a safe embrace lifted her high to the shore of a coral strand. He kissed her, first timidly, wonderingly, with the sacrament of first love on his lips. Then he kissed her as his heart bade him, and when he set her free she was crying, but the tears on his face were not all her tears.
“Little boy, how crazy, how perfectly crazy! Oh, Dan—Dan!”
She clung to him, looking up at him just as his boy-dreams had told him a girl would look some day. Her face was suffused and softened, her lips—her coral-red, fine, lovely lips were trembling, and her eyes were as gray, as profound as those seas his imagination had longed to explore. Made poet for the first time in his life, as his arms were around her, he whispered: “You are all my dreams come true. If any man comes near you I’ll kill him just as sure as fate. I’ll kill him!”
“Hush, hush! I told you you were crazy. We’re both perfectly mad. I have tried my best not to come to this with you. What would your father say? Let me go, let me go; I’ll call Higgins.”
The boy laughed aloud, the laugh of happy youth. He held her so close that she might as well have tried to loose herself from an iron image of the Spanish Inquisition as from his young arms. This slender, delicious, willowy thing he held was Letty Lane, the adored star London went mad over: the triumph of it! It flashed through him as his pulses beat and his heart was high with the conquest, but it was to the woman only that he whispered:
“I’ve said a lot of stuff and I am likely to say a lot more, but I want you to say something to me. Don’t you love me?”
The word on his lips to him was as strange, as wonderful, as though it had been made for him.