He turned, looking up into the flushed young face and drew it closer till their cheeks touched.

“Don’t look at me!  Why do you let me drift like this?  It is madness—­to give up to each other the way we do—­”

“I wish we could give up the world for each other.”

“I wish so too.  I would—­except for the others.  Do you suppose I’d hesitate if it were not for them?”

They looked at each other with a new and subtler audacity.

“You see,” she said with a wistful smile, “this is not Shiela Cardross who sits here smiling into those brown eyes of yours.  I think I died before you ever saw me; and out of the sea and the mist that day some changeling crept into your boat for your soul’s undoing.  Do you remember in Ingoldsby—­’The cidevant daughter of the old Plantagenet line ’?”

They laughed like children.

“Do you think our love-tempted souls are in any peril?” he asked lightly.

The question arrested her mirth so suddenly that he thought she must have misunderstood.

“What is it, Shiela?” he inquired, surprised.

“Garry—­will you tell me something—­if you can?...  Then, what does it mean, the saying—­’souls lost through love’?  Does it mean what we have done?—­because I am married?  Would people think our souls lost—­if they knew?”

“No, you blessed child!”

“Well, how can—­”

“It’s a lie anyway,” he said.  “Nothing is lost through love.  It is something very different they mean.”

“Yes,” she said calmly, “something quite inconceivable, like ‘Faust’ and ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ ...  I thought that was what they meant!”

Brooding over him, silent, pensive, clear eyes fearlessly meeting his, she drifted into guiltless retrospection.

“After all,” she said, “except for letting everybody know that we belong to each other this is practically like marriage.  Look at that honeymoon up there, Garry....  If, somehow, they could think we are engaged, and would let us alone for the rest of our lives, it would not matter....  Except I should like to have a house alone with you.”

And she stooped, resting her cheek lightly against his, eyes vaguely sweet in the moonlight.

“I love you so,” she murmured, as though to herself, “and there seems no end to it.  It is such a hopeless sequence when yesterday’s love becomes to-day’s adoration and to-morrow’s worship.  What am I to do?  What is the use of saying I am not free to love you, when I do?” She smiled dreamily.  “I was silly enough to think it impossible once.  Do you remember?”

“You darling!” he whispered, adoring her innocence.  Then as he lay, head cradled on her knees, looking up at her, all unbidden, a vision of the future in its sharp-cut ominous desolation flashed into his vision—­the world without her!—­the endless stretch of time—­youth with no meaning, effort wasted, attainment without desire, loneliness, arid, terrible days unending.