needs bitter, strength needs weakness, man needs woman. It is only the contrast—the nearness of the other—which can make the one grow to its highest. I love my work, God knows. But it has not been enough for me since I found you. I think it can never be enough for me again."
His hands were ungloved where they came over her gloved ones. Andree looked down on them. Those brown, sinewy, nervous pieces of flesh and blood could strike her out of life by the sudden contraction and swing of their steel muscles and tendons. He was the strong animal; stronger perhaps than Robison, and infinitely less alarming. She lifted his hands suddenly and kissed them. It was her tribute to the man-strength of him, and that was all that she cared for or understood. But to Tempest it was a glorious act that brought the blood to his forehead. He bowed it down on the joined hands.
"God bless you," he said unsteadily. "God bless you, Andree."
Dick, half-asleep over the mess-room fire, was startled by the light which still shone in Tempest's face when he came in to smoke a pipe much later. But no power short of actual proof could have made him connect it with Grange's Andree. He blinked up, half-derisive, half-envious.
"Have you been on the mountain-tops again, you old beggar?" he said. Then, underbreath, he mumbled part of a verse that drifted to him out of the nowhere—
"A veil 'twixt us and Thee, dread God.
A veil 'twixt us and Thee;
Lest we should hear too clear, too clear,
And unto madness see."
