Her crimson cloak had fallen from her shoulders, and Hanson, holding her hand in his, had pushed up her sleeve and was kissing her arm, as he talked, up as far as her elbow and down again to the tips of her fingers.  She did not even attempt to draw her hand away, she was still in that state of apathy, where all her senses seemed dulled; and so she let him babble on, murmuring his adoration and his rose-colored dreams of the future.

“By George!” he exclaimed, in sheer, sincere amazement.  “To think of you, the Black Pearl, spending all these months up here in these dead old mountains without even a moving-picture show to look at.  You got an awful will, girl.”

She gazed with somber eyes beyond him.  Life, did he say “life”?  That was what she asked, what she demanded, life as glorious and as rich in color as a full-blown rose.  And only a little while ago she had dreamed that she could find it with him, that that was what he offered to her.  She remembered the question that Harry Seagreave had asked her.  “What does life mean to you?” Ah, since that first night in the mountains life seemed to have expanded into infinite horizons before her widening vision.  She dreamed over them, forgetful for the moment of the man beside her, until he, turning in the full tide of his talk, pressed his lips ardently, passionately to hers.

Taken by surprise, she uttered one of her fluent Spanish oaths and, springing to her feet, stood with her body slightly bent forward, her hands on her hips, gazing at him with her narrow, gleaming eyes.  Her apathy was gone, she was alive now to her finger tips.

He rose, too.  “Honey, what is it?” he questioned dazedly.  “What’s got you now?”

“Don’t touch me,” she said tensely.  “Don’t dare to touch me.”

He looked at her unbelievingly and then fell back a pace or two.  “My Lord!  What’s the matter with you?” he cried.

“I don’t know,” she muttered wildly.  Her eyes still measured him, his bold, obvious good looks, his ruddy self-complacency, his habitual and shallow geniality, the satisfied vanity of a mouth steadily becoming looser; the depiction of years of self-indulgence in the little veins on his highly colored cheeks; the sagging lines of his well-set-up figure, ever taking on more flesh.

So she saw him, not perhaps as he was, but in the light of her own harsh and unmodified criticism, and mercilessly she reflected upon him all the scorn she felt for herself.  She did not consider or even remember that with what strength of affection he possessed he had loved her; that, after his constitution he had given her of his best, all he had to give, in fact; that for her he had more than once faced danger, and just to see her again was even now facing it, fearlessly.

He had grown to expect from her an infinite variety of moods, but something in her pose, her expression, frightened him now.  “Honey, what are you driving at?” he asked, a little tremulously, and stretched out his hand to lay it on her shoulder.