-shaken in all his nerves.

"Don't be afraid," he said--in his voice he unconsciously betrayed the
impulse that was fighting for possession of him.

She drew herself closer to him with a long, tremulous sigh.

"I'm a coward," she murmured. "I'm shaking so that I can't stand."
She tried to draw herself away--or did she only make pretense to him
and to herself that she was trying?--then relaxed again into his arms.

The thunder cracked and crashed; the lightnings leaped in streaks and
in sheets; the waters gushed from the torn clouds and obscured the
light like a heavy veil. She looked up at him in the dimness--she,
too, was drunk with the delirium of the storms raging without and
within them. His brain swam giddily. The points of gold in her dark
eyes were drawing him like so many powerful magnets. Their lips met
and he caught her up in his arms. And for a moment all the fire of his
intensely masculine nature, so long repressed, raged over her lips, her
eyes, her hair, her cheeks, her chin.

A moment she lay, happy as a petrel, beaten by a tempest; a moment her
thirsty heart drank in the ecstasy of the lightnings through her lips
and skin and hair.

She opened her eyes to find out why there was a sudden calm. She saw
him staring with set, white face through the rain-veil. His arms still
held her, but where they had been like the clasp of life itself, they
were now dead as the arms of a statue. A feeling of cold chilled her
skin, trickled icily in and in. She released herself--he did not
oppose her.

"It seems to me I'll never be able to look you--or myself--in the face
again," he said at last.

"I didn't know it was in me to--to take advantage of a woman's
helplessness."

"I wanted you to do what you did," she said simply.

He shook his head. "You are generous," he answered. "But I deserve
nothing but your contempt."

"I wanted you to do it," she repeated. She was under the spell of her
love and of his touch. She was clutching to save what she could, was
desperately hoping it might not be so little as she feared. "I had
the--the same impulse that you had." She looked at him timidly, with a
pleading smile. "And please don't say you're sorry you did it, even if
you feel so. You'll think me very bold--I know it isn't proper for
young women to make such admissions. But--don't reproach
yourself--please!"

If she could have looked into his mind as he stood there, crushed and
degraded in his o