Then she felt his hand on her shoulder and, yielding to its insistent pressure, she faced him again.

“Nan, is it because you’ve ceased to care that you tell me to go?” He spoke very quietly, but there was something in the tense, hard-held tones before which she blenched—­a note of intolerable fear.

Her shaking hands went up to her face.  It would be better if he thought that of her—­better for him, at least.  For her, nothing mattered any more.

“Don’t ask me, Peter!” she gasped, sobbingly.  “Don’t ask me!”

Slowly his hand fell away from her shoulder.

“Then it’s true?  You don’t care?  Trenby has taken my place?”

A heavy silence dropped between them, broken only by the sullen roll of thunder.  Nan shivered a little.  Her face was still hidden in her hands.  She was struggling with herself—­trying to force from her lips the lie which would send the man’s reeling faith in her crashing to earth and drive him from her for ever.  She knew if he went from her like that, believing she had ceased to care, he would never come back again.  He would wipe her out utterly from his thoughts—­out of his heart.  Henceforward she would be only a dead memory to him—­the symbol of a shattered faith.

It was more than she could bear.  She could not give up that—­Peter’s faith in her!  It was all she had to cling to—­to carry her through life.

She stretched out her arms to him, crying brokenly: 

“Oh, Peter—­Peter—­”

At the sound, of her low, shaken voice, with its infinite appeal for understanding, the iron control he had been forcing on himself snapped asunder, and he caught her in his arms, kissing her with the fierce hunger of a man who has been starved of love.

She leaned against him, physically unable to resist, and deep down in her heart glad that she could not.  For the moment everything was swept away in an anguish of happiness—­in the ecstasy of burning kisses crushed against her mouth and throat and the strained clasp of arms locked round her.

“My woman!” he muttered unsteadily.  “My woman!”

She could feel the hard beating of his heart, and her slender body trembled in his arms with an answering passion that sprang from the depths of her being.  Forgetful of everything, save only of each other and their great love, their lips clung together.

Presently he tilted her head back.  Her face was white, the shadowed eyes like two dark stains on the ivory bloom of a magnolia.

“Beloved! . . .  Nan, say that you love me—­let me hear you say it!”

“You know!” Her voice shook uncontrollably.  “You don’t need to ask me, Peter.  It—­it hurts to love anyone as I love you.”

His hold tightened round her.

“You’re mine . . . mine out of all the world . . . my beloved. . . .”