f the male, quite simply, almost as a
boy might have said it.

"You do care!" he repeated.

And very gently, slowly, he put his arm round her, drew her close to
him, bent down and gave her a long kiss.

For a moment she shut her eyes. She was giving herself up entirely to
physical sensation. Fear, thought, everything except bodily feeling,
seemed to cease in her entirely at that moment. Some fascination which
he possessed, an intense fascination for women, entirely mysterious and
inexplicable, a thing rooted in the body, absolutely overpowered her at
that moment.

It was he who broke the physical spell. He lifted his lips from hers and
she heard the words:

"I want you to marry me. Will you?"

Instantly she was released. A flood of thoughts, doubts, wonderings,
flowed through her. She felt terribly startled.

Marriage with this man! Marriage with Nicolas Arabian! In all her
thoughts of him she had never included the thought of marriage. Yet she
had imagined many situations in which he and she played their parts.
Wild dreams had come to her in sleepless nights, the dreams that visit
women who are awake under fascination. She had lived through romances
with him. She had been with him in strange places, had travelled with
him in sandy wastes, seen the night come with him in remote corners
of the earth, stood with him in great cities, watched the sea waves
slipping away with him on the decks of Atlantic liners. All this she
had done in imagination with him. But never had she seen herself as his
wife.

To be the wife of Arabian!

He let her go directly he felt the surprise in her body.

"Marry you!" she said.

"It could not be anything else," he said, very simply. "Could it?"

She flushed as if he had punished her by his respect for her.

"But--but we scarcely know each other!" she stammered.

"You say that now!"

Again she felt rebuked, as if she were lighter than he and as if he were
surprised by her lightness.

"But we are only--I mean--"

"Let us not talk of it then now if you dislike. But I cannot take such
a thing any way but seriously, knowing what you are. I love you; I would
follow you anywhere. Naturally, therefore, I must think of marriage with
you, or that I am to have nothing."

He stopped. She said nothing; could not say anything.

"With light women one is light. I do not pretend to be a very good man,
better than the others. Those so very good men, I do not believe in them
very much.