“But I don’t want to frighten you.”  His voice was softer than she had ever heard it.  “We aren’t afraid of those we love, you know.”

“Why should I love you?” she enquired gayly.

His pleasant irony was in his laugh.  “Because you can’t help yourself—­you’re obliged to—­it’s your fate.”

She frowned slightly.  “I have no fate except the one I make for myself.”

He bent toward her and this time his hand closed with determination upon hers.  “Well, you may make me what you please,” he said.

Her hand fluttered like an imprisoned bird in his grasp, but he held it with a pressure which sent the blood tingling sharply to the ends of her fingers.  His strength hurt her and yet she found a curious pleasure in the very acuteness of her sensations.

“There’s no use fighting,” he said with a short laugh, “we can’t help ourselves.  You’ll have to marry me, so you may as well give in.”

His tone was mocking, but she felt his tenderness as she had felt it a moment before, resistless and enveloping.  As she smiled up at him, he bent quickly forward and kissed her brow and eyes and mouth, then lifting her chin he kissed, also, the soft fulness of her throat.  When she put up her hands in protest, he crushed them back upon her bosom by the strength of his lips.

She closed her eyes, yielding for one breathless instant to the passion of his embrace.  Her dream and her longing melted swiftly into realisation, and she told herself that the agony of joy was sharper than that of grief.  This was like nothing that she had imagined, and she felt an impulse to fly back into the uncertainty that she had left—­to gain time in which to prepare for the happiness which she told herself was hers.  Yet was it happiness?  Her soul trembled as if from some almost imperceptible shock of disillusionment, and she knew again the sense of unreality which had come to her in the street on the day before.  Again she felt that she was in the midst of a singularly vivid dream from which she would presently awake to life—­and this dream seemed the result of her dual nature, as if even her emotions belonged less to her real existence than to an unconscious projection of thought.

The impulse to escape re-awoke in her, and yet she was clearly aware that she would no sooner fly from him than her insatiable longing would drive her back anew.  His attraction appeared strangely the greater as she withdrew the further from his actual presence, and she knew that if he were absent from her for a day the uncertainty that he aroused would become intolerable.  “Does the soul that I see in him—­the soul of which mine is but the reflection—­really exist, or have I created an image out of mere emptiness?” she asked; and even with the thought it seemed to her that she saw a new seriousness—­a profounder meaning in his face.  Gerty had never touched the hidden springs, nor had any other woman except herself, and the knowledge of this gave her an ecstatic consciousness of power.