"I have come to share—to have you, because I love, because we loved—from the first, all through."
At his slow, trembling words, the woman's face filled with the warm blood of returning life. Her flesh paled and flushed, and her eyes lit slowly with passion; her arms that had rested limply on the table took life once more and grasped him. The feeling sweeping into her lifeless body thrilled him like fire. She was another woman—he had never known her until this communicating clasp.
"You love me?" she asked, with a moan of inarticulate abandonment.
"Love you, love you, love you, Alves," he repeated in savage iteration. "Now,—" he kissed her lips. They were no longer cold. "You are mine, mine, do you understand? Nothing shall touch you. That has passed!"
For a moment she looked at him in question. But instantly her face smiled in content, and she flashed back his passion. She kissed him, drawing him down closer and closer into her warm self.
With this long kiss a new love put forth its strength, not the pale beatitude of his dream, with its sweet wistfulness, its shy desires. That was large and vague and insubstantial, permeating like an odor the humdrum purlieus of the day. This was savage, triumphant, that leaped like flame from his heart to his mouth, that burned blood-red on the black night. It swept away hesitation, a sick man's nicety and doubts, all the prejudices of all times! This was love, unchained, that came like waters from the mountains to quench the thirst of blazing deserts: parched, dry, in dust; now slaked and yet ever thirsty.
"How could it have been otherwise," he murmured, more to himself than to her.
"What?" she asked, startled, withdrawing herself.
"Don't think, don't think!" he exclaimed, in fear of the ebbing of the waters.
Her doubts were calmed, and she yielded to his insistence, slipping into his arms with an unintelligible cry, the satisfied note of desire. For all the waiting of the empty years came this rich payment—love that satisfied, that could never be satisfied.