“I couldn’t keep away.  Life without you has become one long, unbearable hell.”

He spoke with a strange, slow vehemence which seemed to hold the aggregated bitterness and pain of all those solitary months.

A shudder ran through her slight frame.  Her own agony of separation had been measurable with his.

“But you said . . . at Tintagel . . . that we mustn’t meet again.  You shouldn’t have come—­oh, you shouldn’t have come!” she cried tremulously.

He drew a step nearer to her.

“I had to come, I’m a man—­not a saint!” he answered.

She looked up swiftly, trying to read what lay behind the harsh repression in his tones.  She felt as though he were holding something in leash—­something that strained and fought against restraint.

“I’m a man—­not a saint!” The memory of his renunciation at King Arthur’s Castle swept over her.

“Yet I once thought you—­almost that, Peter,” she said slowly.

But he brushed her words aside.

“Well, I’m not.  When I saw you to-day at the studio . . .  God!  Did you think I’d keep away? . . .  Nan, did you want me to?”

The leash was slipping.  She trembled, aching to answer him as her whole soul dictated, to tell him the truth—­that she wanted him every minute of the day and that life without him stretched before her like a barren waste.

“I—­we—­oh, you’re making it so hard for me!” she said imploringly.  “Please go—­go, now!”

Instead, he caught her in his arms, holding her crushed against his breast.

“No, I’m not going.  Oh, Nan—­little Nan that I love!  I can’t give you up again.  Beloved!—­Soul of me!” And all the love and longing, against which he had struggled unavailingly throughout those empty months of separation, came pouring from his lips in a torrent of passionate pleading that shook her heart.

With an effort she tore herself free—­wrenched herself away from the arms whose clasp about her body thrilled her from head to foot.  Somewhere in one of the cells of her brain she was conscious of a perfectly clear understanding of the fact that she must be quite mad to fight for escape from the sole thing in life she craved.  Celia Mallory didn’t really count—­nor Roger and her pledge to him. . . .  They were only shadows.  What counted was Peter’s love for her and hers for him. . . .  Yet in a curious numbed way she felt she must still defer to those shadows.  They stood like sentinels with drawn swords at the gate of happiness, and she would never be able to get past them.  So it was no use Peter’s staying here.

“You must go, Peter!” she exclaimed feverishly.  “You must go!”

A new look sprang into his eyes—­a sudden, terrible doubt and questioning.

“You want me to go?”

“Yes—­yes!” She turned away, gesturing blindly in the direction of the door.  The room seemed whirling round her.  “I—­I want you to go!”