He flung out his hands, shaking uncontrollably.  “Do you see how I show this, say this anywhere, tell this to you here, now, where anyone could hear me?  I am not ashamed of it.  It is not a thing to hide.  It is a thing to glory in.  It is the only honestly living thing in all our miserable human life, the passion of a man and a woman for each other.  It is the only thing that moves us out of our cowardly lethargy of dead-and-alive egotism.  The thing that is really base and false is to pretend that what is dead is still alive.  Your marriage is dead.  Your children do not need you as you pretend.  Let yourself go in this flood that is sweeping us along.  I had never thought to know it.  I could fall down and worship you because you have shown it to me.  But I will show it to you, that and the significance of what you will be when you are no longer smothered and starved.  In all this scrawling ant-heap of humanity, there are only a handful of human beings who ever really live.  And we will be among them.  All the rest are nothing, less than nothing, to be stamped down if they impede you.  They have no other destiny.  But we have!  Everything comes down to that in the end.  That is the only truth.  That . . . and you and I!”

In the distance, someone called Marise’s name.  He thought she made a move, and said, leaning towards her, the heat of his body burning through to her arm where he touched her, “No, no, none of those trivial, foolish interruptions that tie you hand and foot, can tie us any longer.  They have no real strength.  They can’t stand for an instant against something alive.  All that rattles in your ears, that keeps you from knowing what you really are . . .”

Someone was hurrying down the walk towards them, hidden by the hedge.  Marise could not have turned her head if her life had hung on the action.

Vincent looked straight at her, straight and deep and strong into her eyes, and for an instant his burning lips were pressed on hers.  The contact was terrible, momentous.

When he went on speaking, without haste, unafraid although the hurrying steps were almost there, she could scarcely hear his voice, although it was urgent and puissant as the impact of his eyes.  “You can’t get away from this now.  It is here.  It has been said.  It lives between us, and you are not strong enough, no power on earth is strong enough, to put it down.”

* * * * *

And then the outer world broke in on them, swept between them with an outcry.  Someone was there, someone who drew short sobbing breaths, who caught at her and clung to her.  It was Cousin Hetty’s old Agnes . . . why in the world was she here? . . . and she was saying in a loud voice as though she had no control of it, “Oh, oh!  Come quick!  Come quick!”

Marise stood up, carrying the old woman with her.  She was entirely certain now that she was in a nightmare, from which she would presently awake, wet with cold sweat.