Presently a flowering shrub moved slightly. Some branches that overhung a path stirred; then everything was motionless.
She raised her head, her whole frame quivering like a tightly drawn bow.
Out of the shadows, running rather than walking, Emil was advancing.
With one movement she sprang to him and, uttering a low cry, he caught her.
Each on the lips of the other, their souls were drowned in oblivion; for if he kissed her, she as openly kissed him; and if her cheeks were drenched with tears, they certainly were not all of her own shedding. Tempestuous, tragic emotion overflowed the hearts of both. In the delicious anguish of their embrace, the memory of life with its pitiful conventions dropped from them. Loyalty was an empty word, pity a name.
Their clinging arms its walls, their shining eyes its stars, they stood apart in a universe new-made.
And from the old, old sky the moon that watches over this paltry world of man with his misery and his bliss,—the moon looked down on them. Changing her position on her cloudbank, like a head lolling lazily on a pillow, the moon bestowed on the pair of bewildered children the same glance of remote indulgence she recently had bestowed on the lovers in the Garden of Eden. She threw her brightness over their clasping arms and eloquent faces, and with her radiance mischievously deepened the glamour of that supreme moment in their infinitesimal lives. Then sinking amid the down of her pillow, she temporarily disappeared.
"Rachel, what did you mean by leaving me the way you did this afternoon?" Emil whispered, pausing long enough between his kisses to hold back her head, while he looked down into her eyes with his own which were fierce and wet; "Didn't you know it would be useless?"
His words roused her from the spell that had enwrapped her. Freeing herself with violence, she turned on him. The crimson had dropped from her cheek like the colours from a mast head.
"Emil, leave me!"