"But you're not sorry?" I asked.

"I don't want to think--I don't care," she replied. "I only know that I
love you. I wonder if you will ever know how much!"

The moments lengthened into hours, and she gently reminded me that it
was late. The lights in the little farmhouses near by had long been
extinguished. I pleaded to linger; I wanted her, more of her, all of her
with a fierce desire that drowned rational thought, and I feared that
something might still come between us, and cheat me of her.

"No, no," she cried, with fear in her voice. "We shall have to think
it out very carefully--what we must do. We can't afford to make any
mistakes."

"We'll talk it all over to-morrow," I said.

With a last, reluctant embrace I finally left her, walked blindly to
where the motor car was standing, and started the engine. I looked back.
Outlined in the light of the doorway I saw her figure in what seemed an
attitude of supplication....

I drove cityward through the rain, mechanically taking the familiar
turns in the road, barely missing a man in a buggy at a four-corners.
He shouted after me, but the world to which he belonged didn't exist. I
lived again those moments that had followed Nancy's surrender, seeking
to recall and fix in my mind every word that had escaped from her
lips--the trivial things that to lovers are so fraught with meaning.
I lived it all over again, as I say, but the reflection of it, though
intensely emotional, differed from the reality in that now I was
somewhat able to regard the thing, to regard myself, objectively; to
define certain feelings that had flitted in filmy fashion through my
consciousness, delicate shadows I recognized at the time as related to
sadness. When she had so amazingly yielded, the thought for which my
mind had been vaguely groping was that the woman who lay there in my
arms, obscured by the darkness, was not Nancy at all! It was as if this
one precious woman I had so desperately pursued had, in the capture,
lost her identity, had mysteriously become just woman, in all her
significance, yes, and helplessness. The particular had merged
(inevitably, I might have known) into the general: the temporary had
become the lasting, with a chain of consequences vaguely implied that
even in my joy gave me pause. For the first time in my life I had a
glimpse of what marriage might mean,--marriage in a greater sense than
I had ever conceived it, a sort of cosmic sense, implying obligations