“You mean—­” She checked herself in alarm, paralyzed the next instant by the tremendous, unexpected blow of her discovery.

“So you thought there was somebody else!” The delight in his face kept her silent, amazed, incapable of explanation.  His arm was still outstretched, as if he were brushing aside the last flimsy barrier between them, and his voice, with its unrestrained and radiant joy, stirred some faintly quivering echoes in the secret depths of her being.  It was as if the jubilant spirit of spring had flowered suddenly in his look.

“There wasn’t anybody else.”  He came still nearer, and she stood there, startled, incredulous, powerless either to retreat or to prevent the inevitable instant that was approaching.  “At least, there wasn’t anybody I ever knew named Alice except a school teacher when I was a kid.  She was good and she was pretty like you, and I used to dream about her after school, and every evening at dusk I would go out of my way to speak to her in Sixth Avenue.  Once she told me that she’d wait for me to grow up and get rich so I could marry her, and after I went out to Arizona I used to think about her a lot.  When I came on you suddenly, standing there in the dusk with your hands full of lilacs, it all came back to me because you, looked like her, with your dark hair and your tall slenderness.  Then before I knew what I was, doing I called you by her name.  I oughtn’t to have done it,” he finished ecstatically, “but I’m jolly glad now that I did.”

So he also, the man of action and of enterprise, he, the worker and the adventurer, so he also cultivated his garden of dreams!

“I didn’t know—­I didn’t know—­” she found herself murmuring faintly in protest.

“But you know now!” His voice rang out exultantly, and, though she felt that the thing she feared and dreaded was coming upon her, she still stood there without moving a step, without lifting a hand, mesmerized, enchanted, by the force of the man.  “You know now,” he repeated.  “You know now, Gabriella, and you knew all along.”

It was true.  In spite of her surprise, in spite of her shrinking, in spite of her evasion, she confessed it in her heart.  She had known all the time.  Something deep down in her, something secret and profound and clairvoyant, had discerned the truth from the beginning.

“No! no!” she cried out sharply, for, mistaking her silence, he had stooped to her with the directness which impelled all his movements, which so easily brushed aside and discarded intervening encumbrances, and had kissed her on the lips.

For an instant, in the merciless tenderness of his arms, her resistance melted from her.  Beneath the crash of the storm she did not think, she did not struggle, she did not murmur.  Her consciousness seemed suspended, and with her consciousness, her memory, her judgment, even her passionate unshaken loyalty to the love of her youth.  Then, after the moment of weakness, of passive submission, it was as if her soul and body caught fire at a flash, and a quiver of anger ran through her, enkindling her glance and nerving her spirit.