“I can’t, Tod,” she said again, and neither one noticed that she had unconsciously used the name she had heard from his mother, and which she had unconsciously linked with her thoughts of him. “There could never be a unity of purpose in us,” and now, for the first time, she gently withdrew her hand. “I could never be in sympathy with your work, nor you with my views. Have you noticed that we have never held a serious dispute over any topic but one?”
He drew a chair before her, and took her hand again, but this time he patted it between his own as if it were a child’s.
“Gail, dear, that is an obstacle which will melt away. There was a time when I felt as you do. The time will come when you, too, will change.”
“You don’t understand,” she gently told him. “I believe in God the Creator; the Maker of my conscience; my Friend and my Father. I am in no doubt, no quandary, no struggle between faith and disbelief. I see my way clearly, and there are no thorns to cut for me. I shall never change.”
He looked at her searchingly for a moment, and then his face grew grave; but there was no coldness in it, nor any alteration in the blueness of his eyes.
“I shall pray for you,” he said, with simple faith.
Clad in her filmy cream lace gown, Gail walked slowly into her boudoir, and closed the door, and sank upon her divan. She did not stop to-night to let down her hair and change to her dainty negligee, nor to punctiliously straighten the room, nor to turn on the beautiful green light; instead, with all the electric bulbs blazing, she sat with her chin in her hand, and, with her body perfectly in repose, tried to study the whirl of her mind.
She was shaken, she knew that, shaken and stirred as she had never been before. Something in the depths of her had leaped up into life, and cried out in agony, and would not stop crying until it was satisfied.
The hardest part of the whirl from which to untangle herself was the tremendous overwhelming attraction there had been between them. The red wave of consciousness rose up over her neck and crimsoned her cheeks and flushed her very brow, as the nearness of him came back to her. Again she could feel that marvellous welding of their palms, the tingle of her shoulder where he had accidentally brushed against it; the music of his voice, which had set up that ecstatic answering vibration within her. She felt again his warm breath upon her cheek, the magnetic thrill of his arms as he enfolded her, the breathless joy which had ensued when he had drawn her to his breast, and held and held and held her there, as an indivisible part of him, forever and forever. The burning pressure of his lips upon hers! That breathless, intolerable ecstasy when he had folded her closer, and still closer! A sense of shame flooded her that she had yielded so much, that she had been so helpless in the might and the strength and the sweep—