happened and smile a
little and seem to drift the farther into the harbor of security into
which she had come.

He saw that--exhausted, protected, comforted--she was going to fall
asleep. His heart was all tenderness for her as he held her, adoring her,
sorrowing over her, guarding her. "I haven't really slept all summer,"
she murmured at last, and after a few minutes her breathing told that
sleep had come.

But when, in trying to unfasten her collar--he longed to be doing some
little thing for her comfort--he took his hand from hers, she started up
in alarm and he had to put it back, reassuring her, telling her that she
was not alone, that nothing could ever harm her again.

An hour passed. And in that hour things which he would have believed
fixed loosened and fell. It was all shaken--the whole of his thinking. It
could never be the same again. Old things must go. New things come.

Watching Ann, yearning over her, sorrowing, adoring, he saw life as what
life had done to her. Saw it as the thing she had found.

He watched the curve of her mouth. Her beautiful bosom rising and falling
as she slept. The lovely line of her throat, the blood throbbing in her
throat, her long lashes upon her cheek, that loveliness--beauty--that
sweetness and tenderness--and _what it had met_. She, so exquisitely
fashioned for love--needful of it--so perfect--so infinitely to be
desired and cherished--and _what she had found_. He writhed under a
picture of that old man bending over her--of that other man--bully,
brute--thick awful lips snatching at her as a dog at meat. And then still
another man. That first man. Darrett. _His_ friend. _His_ sort. The man
who could so skillfully use the lure of love to rob life--

As he thought of him--his charm, cleverness--how that, too, had been
pitted against her--starved, then offered what she would have no way of
judging--close to her loveliness, conscious of her warmth, her breath,
the superb curves of her lovely body--thinking of what Darrett had
found--taken--what he had left her _to_--there were several minutes when
his brain was unpiloted, a creaking ship churning a screaming sea.

And now? Had it killed it in her? Taken it? If he were to kiss her in the
way he hungered to kiss her would it wake nothing more than that sick
terror in her wonderful eyes? That thought became as a band of hot steel
round his throat. Was it _gone_? How could she be sleeping that way with
her hand in his--his fa