ot what. "Wayne! What is it?"

"What is it?" Shandon's voice had dropped lower, was so hoarse that it
did not seem Wayne Shandon's voice at all. "It is just this--"

He broke off as sharply as she had done and moving swiftly as though
driven by some great compelling force which dominated him he stooped
and swept her up into his arms. She felt the tightening muscles as he
drew her close, closer to him; felt a little tremor running through his
whole body; heard the beating of his heart; was drawn nearer to him
than she had ever been drawn to a man in her life; realised for the
first time in a flutter of many sweeping emotions how superbly big and
powerful the man was, how almost god-like in the beauty of his muscular
manhood . . . and then she knew nothing but the wonderful fact that he
had kissed her full upon her quivering red mouth.

"My God, Wanda, how I love you!" he exclaimed with sudden wild,
unleashed vehemence. "Do you hear me?" He was holding her a little
away from him, his arms still shaking about her shoulders, his voice
frightening her with the vibrant fierceness that had leaped into it,
the love in his eyes glowing like fire. "I love you so that I'd go
through Hell to have you, to have you for mine, all mine! So that I
might fight a man for daring to look at you, that I might kill a man
for harming you! Wanda, girl, I tell you that I love you! Do you
understand? Do you know what that means? What love means? When a man
loves a woman as I do?"

Always a man of impulse, a man who through years of habit had grown to
act swiftly in little things and big things alike, Wayne Shandon flung
into impassioned words the emotions which swept through his soul and
brain. The sight of Wanda Leland, grown into the sweet, pure beauty of
early womanhood, had stirred him to the depths. Her casual mention of
other men, Garth, and Sledge Hume, had displeased him so vaguely that
he had not fully understood or cared why. And then the light allusion
to the danger of death in which she had stood had been the spark in the
powder train of his love, his words exploded from the seething
consciousness newly awakened, fires long smouldering unsuspected in his
heart burst forth in a mighty conflagration of emotion.

Throughout his whole being there was a strange, new, throbbing
buoyancy, the gladness that sings, the joy that sparkles. The elixir
of life had been set suddenly before him. He did not taste and put it
awa