."

"Duty! Duty!" he said impatiently. "Duty is your fetish. You sacrifice
your whole life to it. And what do you get in return? A sense of virtue
perhaps, nothing more. There isn't much warming power in virtue. I've
tried it and I know!" He broke off to utter a very bitter laugh. "And so
I've given it up," he said. "It's a trail that leads to nowhere."

Anne's brows drew together for an instant. "I hoped you might come to
think otherwise," she said.

He shrugged his shoulders. "How can I? I've lived the life of a saint for
the past six months, and I am no nearer heaven than when I began. It's
too slow a process for me. I wasn't made to plough an endless furrow."

"We all of us say that," said Anne, with her faint smile. "But do we
any of us really know what we were made for? Are we not all in the
making still?"

He thrust out his chin. "I can't be abstruse tonight. I know what I
was made for, and I know what you were made for. That--anyway for
tonight--is all that matters."

He spoke almost brutally, yet still he held himself as it were aloof. He
was staring unblinking into the sunset. Already the furnace was dying
down. The thunder-clouds were closing up. The black bars had drawn
together into one immense mass, advancing, ominous. Only through a single
narrow slit the red light still shone.

Mutely they watched it pass, Anne with her sad eyes fixed and thoughtful,
Nap still with that suggestion of restrained activity as if he watched
for a signal.

Gradually the rift closed, and a breathless darkness came.

Anne uttered a little sigh. "I wish the storm would break," she said. "I
am tired of waiting."

As if in answer, out of the west there rose a long low rumble.

"Ah!" she said, and no more.

For as if the signal had come, Nap turned with a movement
incredibly swift, a movement that was almost a spring, and caught her
up into his arms.

"Are you tired of waiting, my Queen--my Queen?" he said, and there was a
note of fierce laughter in his words. "Then--by heaven--you shall wait
no longer!"

His quick breath scorched her face, and in a moment, almost before she
knew what was happening, his lips were on her own. He kissed her as she
had never been kissed before--a single fiery kiss that sent all the blood
in tumult to her heart. She shrank and quivered under it, but she was
powerless to escape. There was sheer unshackled savagery in the holding
of his arms, and dismay thrilled her through and through.