She shook her head, but her hands lay as motionless as though their nerves were dead.  She could feel the throbbing pulses of his fingers and suddenly he bent forward and pressed his lips to hers, while she stood amazed and unresisting.  “Or kiss your lips—­like this—­would you?  With women I am timid, because I have never before been a lover.  I could not do what I am doing unless something stronger than myself were acting through me.  It is the chemistry of souls.  It is written.”  He let his arms fall at his sides.

Mary Burton pressed her temples with her fingers.  Her knees felt weak and she stood unsteadily on her feet.  The man passed a supporting arm about her waist.  Finally, she drew herself up and laughed with a nervousness that bordered on the hysterical.

“I wonder,” she said brokenly; and paused only to repeat again:  “I wonder whether it’s the great adventure I’ve dreamed of—­or just moon-madness?  Ought I to be very angry?”

“You will have time to decide,” he told her.  “What I have said and done I shall say and do again—­often.”

“It’s strange,” she murmured as though talking to herself.  “I thought I understood men.  I’m not a schoolgirl any more.  Yet I’m as bewildered as though you were the first man who ever said, ‘I love you.’”

“Thank God for that.”

She turned and laid a hand on his arm.  Her voice came with a musical vehemence.

“If I do come to love you, I think it will be heaven or hell to me.  I’m not going to be angry until I’ve thought about it—­and thought hard, and I’m not going to love you unless you make me.  Come, let’s go back.”

As they turned into the path toward the house, she broke irrelevantly into laughter.

“When you lighted your match—­and burned your fingers—­what did you think of my pearls?”

“I didn’t see them,” he promptly replied.  “Were you wearing pearls?”

Confused by the sudden and marvelous consciousness of all life being changed at a stroke, of doors that had swung wide between all the old and all the new, Mary Burton walked as in a daze, her fingers toying with the gems about her neck.  But before she had taken many steps the man laid a hand on her arm and halted her.  When she turned he caught her by her shoulders and his words came tumultuously and with an impassioned earnestness.

“You must not deny me the chance to say something more,” he declared.  “What I have said is either too much or too little.  You ask me whether I saw your pearls.  When I first spoke to you—­a child with all autumn’s glory blazing at your back, did I have eyes for trees and skies and landscapes; though they were splendid and profligate in their beauty?  No.  I saw you—­only you!  If you had stood against a drab curtain it would have been the same.  You were a child, too young to stir an adult heart to love or passion....  What was it then that fixed you from that moment in my heart?”