moment and then
stepped back and leaned against the wall of the house. Her hands
pressed against the weather-boarding with outspread fingers. Out of a
white face she looked straight before her with eyes preternaturally
wide and full of dazed wonderment.

At first there was no resentment, no denunciation. The girl only
leaned there with parted lips and heaving bosom and that fixed gaze
which, for all its rigid tensity, seemed groping.

It was not as the individual that she now thought of Jack Halloway but
of the terrifying and unexplained force that he had awakened in
herself; the force of things that she never until now realized.

Halloway did not speak. He bent a little toward her, looking at her as
his own breath came fast. At first he did not even marvel at the
stunned, groping blankness of the unmoving features.

He had known that when she awoke it would be with the shock of latent
fires set loose. Now it was a time to go very gently with her, until
she found her footing in fuller comprehension again.

Then the girl said so faintly that he could hardly hear her:

"Thet's ther fust time thet. . . ." She broke off there.

"I know it, Alexander. I couldn't stay away. I had to come!"

He took a step forward with outstretched arms but she lifted a pleading
hand.

"Don't," she said. "I've got ter think . . . go away now."

And triumphantly confident of what would come out of her meditation, he
turned and picked up his hat and left her standing there. He might
have talked to her of passionate love, he told himself, to the end of
time and it would have meant nothing. Instead he had brought her face
to face with it--and now there was no need of talk.

Jack Halloway had meant it when he admitted to Brent in New York that
it would not do to give rein to his thoughts of Alexander. They were
all lawless thoughts of a love not to be trammeled by the obligations
of marriage.

If he hated the civilized world at times, there were other times when
he could not live without it, and into its conventionalized pattern,
Alexander could never fit. She was not civilized enough or educated
enough to take her place there at his side, nor was she pagan enough to
come to him without terms or conditions. So he had resolved to stay
away, and put her out of his mind and in that determination he failed.
Now he had flung away all heed. He had held her in his arms and
consequences could care for themselves!

But when