She was in despair.  “Do you think that?” She searched his face anxiously as though she found there more than in his speech.  “Yes, yes, I see what you mean.”  She drew a long breath.  “I can even see how fine it is of you to say that to me now.  It’s like a promise of how you will try.  But oh, Neale, I won’t want life on any other terms!”

She stopped, looking down at her hand in his.  He tightened his clasp.  His gaze on her darkened and deepened.  “It’s like sending me to get the apples of Hesperides,” he said, looking older than she, curiously and suddenly older.  “I want to say yes!  It would be easy to say yes.  Darling, darling Marise, you can’t want it more than I!  But the very intelligence that makes you want it, that makes me want it, shows me how mortally hard it would be!  Think!  To be loyal to what is deepest and most living in yourself . . . that’s an undertaking for a life-time’s effort, with all the ups and downs and growths of life.  And then to try to know what is deepest and most living in another . . . and to try . . .  Marise!  I will try.  I will try with all my might.  Can anybody do more than try with all his might?”

Their gaze into each other’s eyes went far beyond the faltering words they spoke.  She asked him in a low voice, “Couldn’t you do more for me than for yourself?  One never knows, but . . . what else is love for, but to give greater strength than we have?”

There was a moment’s silence, in which their very spirits met flame-like in the void, challenging, hoping, fearing.  The man’s face set.  His burning look of power enveloped her like the reflection of the sun.  “I swear you shall have it!” he said desperately, his voice shaking.

She looked up at him with a passionate gratitude.  “I’ll never forget that as long as I live!” she cried out to him.

The tears stood in his eyes as in hers.

For the fraction of an instant, they had felt each other there, as never before they had felt any other human being:  they had both at once caught a moment of flood-tide, and both together had been carried up side by side; the long, inevitable isolation of human lives from birth onward had been broken by the first real contact with another human soul.  They felt the awed impulse to cover their eyes as before too great a glory.

The tide ebbed back, and untroubled they made no effort to stop its ebbing.  They had touched their goal, it was really there.  Now they knew it within their reach.  Appeased, assuaged, fatigued, they felt the need for quiet, they knew the sweetness of sobriety.  They even looked away from each other, aware of their own bodies which for that instant had been left behind.  They entered again into the flesh that clad their spirits, taking possession of their hands and feet and members, and taken possession of by them again.  The fullness of their momentary satisfaction had been so complete that they felt no regret, only a simple, tender pleasure as of being again at home.  They smiled happily at each other and sat silent, hand in hand.