He was swept by a sudden awed abashment. The impulse to retreat came over him, but he lacked the will. The longing which had remained so strong in him through years of denial, governing the whole course of his life, blazed up in him now and increased with every heartbeat. He found that without willing it he had come close to the couch. The girl's slim hand lay upon the cushions, limply upturned to him; it was half open and there sprang through him an ungovernable desire to bury his lips in its rosy palm. He knelt, then quailed and recovered himself. At the same instant she stirred and, to his incredulous delight, whispered his name.
A wild exultation shot through him. Why not yield to this madness, he asked himself, dizzily. The long struggle was over now. For this woman's sake he had repeatedly played the part of bravery in a fever of fear. He had done what he had done to make himself worthy of her, and now, at the last, he was to have nothing—absolutely nothing, except a memory. Against these thoughts his notions of honorable conduct hastily and confusedly arrayed themselves. But he was in no state to reason. The same enchantment, half psychic, half physical, ethereal yet strongly human, that had mastered him in the old Sicilian days, was at work upon him now. Dimly he felt that so mighty and natural a thing ought not to be resisted. He stood stiffly like a man spellbound.
It may have been Oliveta's accusation that affected the course of the sleeping woman's thoughts, it may have been that she felt the man's nearness, or that some influence passed from his mind to hers. However it was, she spoke his name again, her fingers closed over his, she drew him toward her.
He yielded; her warm breath beat upon his face; then the last atoms of self-restraint fled away from him like sparks before a fierce night wind. A fiery madness coursed through his veins as he caught her to him. Her lips were fevered with sleep. For a moment the caress seemed real; it was the climax of his hopes, the attainment of his longings. He crushed her in his arms; her hair blinded him; he buried his face in it, kissing her brow, her cheek, the curve where neck and shoulder met, and all the time he was speaking her name with hoarse tenderness.
So strangely had the fanciful merged into the real that the girl was slow in waking. Her eyelids fluttered, her breast rose and fell tumultuously, and even while her wits were struggling back to reality her arms clung to him. But the transition was brief. Her eyes opened, and she stiffened as with the shock of an electric current. A cry, a swift, writhing movement, and she was upon her feet, his incoherent words beating upon her ears but making no impression upon her brain.
"You! God above!" she cried.
She faced him, white, terror-stricken, yet splendid in her anger. She was still dazed, but horror and dismay leaped quickly into her eyes.
"Margherita! You called me. You drew me to you. It was your real self that spoke—I know it."
"You—kissed me while—I slept!"
He paled at the look with which she scorched him, then broke out, doggedly: