At the sight of it, the dear light of everyday, Marise felt the thankful tears come to her eyes.

“See, Agnes,” she said in an unsteady voice, “daylight has come.  You can look around for yourself, and see that there is nothing to be afraid of.”

CHAPTER XXVI

MARISE LOOKS AND SEES WHAT IS THERE

A Torch in a Living Tree

July 24.

Not since his fiery, ungovernable youth had Vincent felt anything like the splendid surge of rich desire and exultant certainty which sent him forward at a bound along the wood-road into which he had seen Marise turn.  The moment he had been watching for had come at last, after these three hideous days of sudden arrest and pause.  The forced inaction had been a sensation physically intolerable to him, as though he had been frozen immobile with every nerve and muscle strained for a great leap.

He felt himself taking the leap now, with such a furious, triumphant sense of power released, that he came up beside her like a wind in the forest, calling her name loudly, his hands outflung, his face glowing, on fire with joy and his need for her.

For an instant he was dumfounded by the quiet face she turned on him, by his instant perception of a profound change in her, by an expression in her long dark eyes which was new to him, which he felt to be ominous to him.  But he was no untried boy to be cast down or disconcerted by sudden alterations of mood in a woman.  He was a man, with a man’s trained tenacity of purpose and experienced quickness of resource.

He wasted no time.  “What has happened to you?” he demanded, peremptorily as by right to know, and with the inner certainty of over-riding it, whatever it was.

She did not seem tacitly or otherwise to deny his right to know, but she seemed to have no words for it, continuing to look at him silently, intently, with no hostility, with a sort of steady, wondering attention in her face, usually so sensitively changing.  He felt a resentment at its quiet, at its lack of that instant responsiveness to his look which had given him such moments of exquisite pleasure, which had been her own, her wonderful gift to him.  She was looking at him now as she might have looked at any one else, merely in order to see what was there.

Well, he would show her what was there!  The will to conquer rose high and strong in him, with an element of fierceness it had not had before because no resistance had called it out.  He did not show this, indeed only allowed it the smallest corner of his consciousness, keeping all the rest tautly on the alert for the first indication of an opening, for the first hint of where to throw his strength.

But standing in suspense on the alert was the last role he could long endure, and in a moment, when she did not answer, he took a step towards her, towering above her, his hands on her shoulders, pouring out with a hot sense of release all his longing into the cry, “Marise, Marise my own, what has happened to you?”