The cab rattled over the cobbles of that wide East-end thoroughfare, past the throngs of moving pedestrians, though, to her consciousness, the whole wide world consisted of but one man—the man at her side.
He had secured her hand, he held it in his strong, hot clasp. She held her breath in a strange, expectant ecstasy. Then the inevitable came. She felt its coming.
Tom Hammond was drawing her closer to himself. She was yielding to that drawing. She caught her breath again, and as she did so a rush of strange tears filled her eyes.
“Zillah!” his voice was hoarse and deep.
She realized the meaning of the hoarseness. She knew by her own feeling that the depth and intensity of his voice was due to the emotion that filled him. She knew she would have found herself voiceless at that moment had she tried to speak.
“I love you, my darling!” he went on. “I have loved you from the first instant I met you. You have felt it, known it, dear. Have you not?”
She tried to speak, her lips moved, but no sound came from them. But she looked into his eyes, and he read his answer.
With a sweeping gesture of passionate love he gathered her into his arms and showered kisses upon her lips, her cheeks, her forehead, her hair.
She lay like a stunned thing in his arms. Her joy was almost greater than she could bear. Then as his hot lips sought hers again, she awoke from her semi-trance of ecstasy, and with a little sob she flung her arms upwards and clasped them about his neck, crying,
“Love you, my darling? Love seems too poor a word to express my feeling, for God knows that, save my Lord Jesus, to whom to-night I have fully yielded, you are all my life.”