Out of the night shadows a nymph seemed to be floating toward him. For a moment he had a sense of unreality, that the flow and rhythm of her movement were born of the imagination. But almost at once he knew that this was June in the flesh.
The moonlight haloed the girl, lent her the touch of magic that transformed her from a creature not too good for human nature’s daily food into an ethereal daughter of romance. Her eyes were dark pools of loveliness in a white face.
“June!” he cried, excitement drumming in his blood.
Why had she come to find him? What impulse or purpose had brought her out into the night in his wake? Desire of her, tender, poignant, absorbing, pricked through him like an ache. He wanted her. Soul and body reached out to her, though both found expression only in that first cry.
Her mouth quivered. “Oh, Bob, you silly boy! As if—as if it matters why you were stunned. You were. That’s enough. I’m so glad—so glad you’re not hurt. It’s ’most a miracle. He might have killed you.”
She did not tell him that he would have done it if she had not flung her weight on his arm and dragged the weapon down, nor how in that dreadful moment her wits had worked to save him from the homicidal mania of the killer.
Bob’s heart thumped against his ribs like a caged bird. Her dear concern was for him. It was so she construed friendship—to give herself generously without any mock modesty or prudery. She had come without thought of herself because her heart had sent her.
“What matters is that when I called you came,” she went on. “You weren’t afraid then, were you?”
“Hadn’t time. That’s why. I just jumped.”
“Yes.” The expression in her soft eyes was veiled, like autumn fires in the hills blazing through mists. “You just jumped to help me. You forgot he carried two forty-fives and would use them, didn’t you?”