FLAMING visions.
YOUTH
“I wish it was us,” she murmured.
Going away.
To-night.
205 “You and I.
'Together.”
“My God! Pat!” “I do. I wish there weren’t any laws. I hate laws.” The terrible, fiery desire seized him to claim her then and there, to bid her leave everything for love and go with him to the ends of the earth, to overwhelm her with the force of his desire; to make her believe that with him
she would know a happiness greater, fuller, more real than anything in her petty and tinselled prospect of life; seized and scorched and convulsed him, until she felt, through the hand which she had let fall upon his arm, the tremors shake his strong frame; felt them and exulted, through her woman’s dim alarms,
- No!” he said hoarsely, in a voice which told how spent
ne was by the struggle against himself. “Not that, Pat. Not for you. I’d give the soul out of my body to take you away with me. You know that, don’t you?” “Yes,” she assented. She was daunted by the depths of passion which she had evoked. But only for the moment. The reaction brought back to her her hoydenish flippancy. “You don’t for a minute think I’d go, do you? I was only wishing!” “For God’s sake, don’t wish!’
“I do wish there weren’t any laws. There ought to be a world where we could go when we’re tired of this one, where laws and rules and things don’t count, and we could come back when—when things got too hectic there.” “Fools think there is, and go there. But they don’t
come back.” “Let’s pretend that there is such a world,” she besought childishly, “and that we can go there whenever we want to. There you could kiss me as much as you liked whethes
