She seemed, as ever, the dream, the vision, the ideal, the unattainable divinity man's soul continually strives after.
A moment more and she was in my arms. Her physical semblance was mine, in which her spirit walked and moved, and I was the owner and conqueror of that at least.
"Trevor dear, be gentle!" she murmured in laughing remonstrance, but her white arms did not unlock from my neck nor her soft lips move far from mine.
"How happy I am now," she said, sinking into my embrace, "and how well you look, Trevor, how splendid! So strong and gloriously full of life!"
"I wonder I do," I answered, "after this cruel year you gave me. How could you leave me as you did while I was asleep beside you, and what was your reason? You will have to tell me now."
"I believe you would be happier if I did not, if you just trusted me and never asked to know," she answered, smiling back at me. "Are we not perfectly happy now? You have me again; look at me, am I just the same as when we parted?"
I looked at her intently, eagerly, my eyes drinking in all the perfect vision before me, each slim outline of the body, lying back now on the couch where we both were sitting, all the delicacy of the transparent skin, the smooth white forehead with its fine, straight-drawn eyebrows, the lovely eyes searching mine. Yes, I had lost nothing of my possession, and there seemed rather something added to that inner light and that wonderful look of intellect and power that shone through the face.
"I think you are the same," I said slowly, seeking vainly to express that indefinable extra light that seemed upon her face.
"Only perhaps more lovely. But tell me what your reason was. I cannot bear to think there is a dark gap between us."
"You are so happy at this moment it seems a pity," she murmured softly. "You will not feel so happy when you know, and it's all over and past and forgotten. It's a thunderstorm that has rolled by and left us again in the sunlight. We are in Paradise now, are we not?"
I looked at her, and the triumph of delighted joy I had in her rose up to my brain, filling it, making all else seem obscure and of no account. Yet something in her words stirred my brain anxiously. Why should I mind hearing what she had to say? Was it possible that she had acted on her first letter to me, after all, and, while forcing freedom on me, taken it also for herself? Was it possible she had lent my possession, herself, to another? That blind, insensate jealousy of the male in physical matters instantly flamed up through me. In that moment of extreme passion for her, of expected triumph and delight, it burnt at its most furious pitch. I felt I must _know_, must drag the secret out of her, and if it was what I thought in that unreasoning moment, I would kill us both.