Her lips met his in an eternity of giving and taking.
“No!” he said again, but his voice quivered and broke, with the plain message of surrender.
With a little cry, she knelt at the edge of the pool, her arms still about him so that he was forced to kneel with her. She plunged her hands into the water, and lifted them to him with their silver freight.
With an eager, moaning sound, he drank the cool water; and as he did so the red mist before his eyes thickened, and his ears roared with the thunder of blood within. To drink became then his passion, and he cupped his own hands, filled them with water, and drank.
For a moment the mist cleared and the roaring ceased, and he saw that he was alone on the rock.
“Sadie!” he called.
The answering sound might have been only the prattle of the stream, or it might have been low laughter.
The thought came to him that perhaps she had fled to the bank, and with prodigious labor he clambered up the tiny slope. She was not there. He parted the soft-flowing curtain of the willows, and though the fronds were so light a bird might have flown through them, he gasped with the effort it cost him.
Staggering into the sunlight beyond the fringe of trees, he found that she was not there, either. He tried to run, but only stumbled, lifting himself painfully to stagger onward. Then the mist of his delirium closed upon him, and the blood at his ear drums pounded and a tumult came out of earth and sky to overwhelm him.