"Well, you should be, naughty child. Now shut your eyes and go to sleep,—and fair dreams and sweet repose," I replied.
"Won't you give me one little good-night kiss?"
"I gave you one downstairs."
"Is it very wicked to want another?"
There was not a foot between our two beds, so I bent over and took her soft white shoulders in my arms and kissed her. All the heaped-up sweetness of the whitest, freshest flowers of the spring seemed in my embrace as I kissed her, so soft, so fragrant, so pure; and as the moonlight was the white fire in our blood. Softly I released her, stroked her brown hair, and turned again to my pillow. Presently the little voice was in the room again,—
"Mayn't I hold your hand? Somehow I feel lonely and frightened."
So our hands made a bridge across which our dreams might pass through the night, and after a little while I knew that she slept.
As I lay thus holding her hand, and listening to her quiet breathing, I realised once more what my young Alastor had meant by the purity of high passion. For indeed the moonlight that fell across her bosom was not whiter than my thoughts, nor could any kiss—were it even such a kiss as Venus promised to the betrayer of Psyche—even in its fiercest delirium, be other than dross compared with the wild white peace of those silent hours when we lay thus married and maiden side by side.