"How low of you!" she cried.
But von Klausen only smiled his young, careless smile.
"To mention the truth?" he murmured.
"To bring up such a trifle—to trade on such a confidence—to make of an impulsive action and of the consequences of that action—you know—I told you at the time, and you must know—that I didn't mention the circumstances to my husband merely because to mention it would have been to betray your terror of the fog, and I thought that, as a soldier, you would not want your terror known."
"Ah—so you did think of me, then?"
"I shall never think of you again, at any rate."
They were now half-way along the Lac Inférieur. Under the arching trees in their new spring green and through the silence of the sunlit spring morning, there came to them the music of the falling water from the Carrefour des Cascades. Von Klausen leaned toward his unwilling companion. His lithe figure trembled, his pink cheeks burned; in his blue eyes there gleamed a fire that had been too long repressed.
"No!" he said, hoarsely. "You have thought of me since ever you touched my hand, Muriel, and you shall think of me always—think of me deeply. I cannot help what I say. I must say it. I must say it, and you must listen. I tell you now, once and forever—I tell you——"
Muriel felt only a torrent of emotions that she could in no wise understand. She was terribly angry; she was a little afraid; yet there was a fascination in this spectacle of a strong man with passions wholly unloosed—the first time that she had seen such a man so moved in spite of all the hampering harness of convention—and she was undeniably curious. Outraged, surprised, hurt, she nevertheless felt a certain sensation of flattery in her leaping heart: the not unsatisfactory knowledge that she had done this thing; that, in the last analysis, this soldier trained to discipline, this alien educated to respect marriage and to find beauty in the familiar types of his own land, had been goaded beyond endurance by her own body and soul into a rebellion against all his inherited traditions, into an overthrow of his inherent opinions. And beyond this, more vital than this, there was something else—something unguessed: the call of Youth to Youth, the demand of the young for the young, careless of racial difference, regardless of ancestral training, which, once unleashed, shatters every barrier of elaborately conceived convention.
Education is, however, a force that must be reckoned with. Even at the last, it will have its word.