"Oh, but I wouldn't take you—seriously!"
"I mean it. You're coming."
"I'm dreaming."
"I mean it." His voice was almost savage. "I want you."
Fear ran like a challenge through her exultation. She felt herself a small fluttering thing against his breast, while the intoxicating music swept them on through a whirling crowd. His face so close to her was keen and hard, his eyes were reckless as her own leaping blood. "All I've ever needed is a girl like you. You're not going to get away this time."
"Oh, but I'm perfectly respectable!"
"All right! Marry me."
Behind the chaos of her mind there was the tense, suffocating hesitation of the instant before a diver leaves the spring-board—security behind him, ecstasy ahead. His nearness, his voice, the light in his eyes, were all that she had been wanting, without knowing it, all these months. The music stopped with a crash.
He stood, as he had stood once before, his arm still tight around her, and in a flash she saw that other time and the dreary months that had followed.
"All right. It's settled?" There was the faintest question in his confident voice.