“You darling!  I was only teasing you.”

“I’ll do anything on earth for you that I can, George.”

“I know you will, dearest, and you don’t honestly care more for your family, do you?”

“I love you better than all the rest of the world put together.  There are times when I think it must be wrong to love any man as much as I love you.  My grandmother used to say that when you loved like that you ‘tempted Providence.’  Isn’t it dreadful to believe that you could tempt Providence by loving?”

He kissed her throat where a loosened strand of dark hair had fallen against the whiteness.

“Will you do what I ask, Gabriella?”

So it was all to begin over again!  He had not really given in, he had not really yielded even while he was kissing her.  She closed her eyes, leaning her head on his shoulder.  For a moment she felt as if a physical pain were pressing into her forehead.

“Will you do it, Gabriella?” It was as if he put his soul into his voice, wooing her tenderly away from her better judgment.  He was testing his power to dominate her; and never had she felt it so vividly, never had her will been so incapable of resisting him as at that instant.  Moving slightly in his arms she looked at the clear red brown of his throat, at his sensitive mouth, with the faint dent in the lower lip, at his bright blue eyes, which had grown soft while he pleaded.  His physical power over her was complete, and he knew it.  Her flesh had become as soft as flowers in his arms, while her eyes, like dark flames, trembled and fell away from his look.

“It isn’t only the thing itself, darling, but I don’t like you to refuse me.  It hurts me that you won’t do what I ask of you.”

“If it were anything else, George.”

“But it isn’t anything else.  It is just that I want you to myself—­all to myself, after we are married.”

“Don’t ask me, dearest.  If you only knew how it makes me suffer.”

Her voice was a caress when she answered, but, as he told himself passionately, she had not yielded an inch.  Once again he had run against the iron hidden under the bloom.

“Then you refuse absolutely?” he asked, and though his voice quivered still, it was no longer from tenderness.  He hated stubbornness, and, most of all, he hated it in the woman who was going to be his wife.  A life of continual contradiction, he felt, would be intolerable.  A strong will, which he had always admired in himself, became a positive failing in Gabriella.  A woman’s strength lay, after all, not in force of character, but in sweetness of nature.  And yet how lovely she was!  How soft, how sweet she looked as she gazed up at him with her radiant eyes.  There was a fascination for him in her tall slenderness, in the graceful curve of her head, which drooped slightly like a dark flower on its stem.  Everything about her charmed him, and yet he had never called her beautiful in his thoughts.