t's because we
haven't crossed it we're wretched," he said determinedly. "Cross it
with me now!" He caught her in his arms. She struggled to escape. She
knew what was coming and fought to keep her face from him. With
resistless strength and yet carefully as a mother with an obstinate
child, he held her slight body against his breast, relentlessly
drawing her head closer. "Let me go!" she panted, twisting her averted
head from the hollow of his arm. Drinking in the wine of her
frightened breath, he bent over her in the darkness until his pulsing
eagerness linked her warm lips to his own. She had surrendered to his
first kiss.

He spoke. "The gulf's crossed. Are you so awfully wretched?"

They sank together down on the bench. "What," she faltered, "will
become of me now?"

"You are better off now than you ever were, Nan. You've gained this
moment a big brother, a lover you can drag around the world after you
with a piece of thread."

"You act as if I could!"

"I mean it: it's true. I'm pledged to you forever--you, to me,
forever. We'll keep our secret till we can manage things; and we
_will_ manage them. Everything will come right, Nan, because
everything must come right."

"I only hope you are not wrong," she murmured, her eyes turned toward
the sombre mountains.

CHAPTER XIX

DANGER

With never such apprehension, never such stealth, never so heavy a
secret, so sensible a burning in cheek and eye, as when she tiptoed
into her uncle's room at midnight, Nan's heart beat as the wings of a
bird beat from the broken door of a cage into a forbidden sky of
happiness. She had left the room a girl; she came back to it a woman.

Sleep she did not expect or even ask for; the night was all too short
to think of those tense, fearful moments that had pledged her to her
lover. When the anxieties of her situation overwhelmed her, as they
would again and again, she felt herself in the arms of this strange,
resolute man whom all her own hated and whom she knew she already
loved beyond all power to put away. In her heart, she had tried this
more than once: she knew she could not, would not ever do it, or even
try to do it, again.

She rejoiced in his love. She trusted. When he spoke she believed this
man whom no one around her would believe; and she, who never had
believed what other men avowed, and who detested their avowals,
believed de Spain, and secretly, guiltily, glowed in every word of his
devotion and breat