ready-, long before, we had understood one another. But there were a thousand thoughts rushing through my brain.
He bent his marvellously beautiful head down to my knees, and whispered low some few strange inaudible words—words of incantation, words of magic: he could afford to be humble, for he was like a king who knows how mighty he is and how supreme. And then his lips were very red, as on fire. …
All at once I shook myself free with a hissing intake of the breath, and gently extricated myself from his embrace.
"What, my Queen of the Icy Caverns!" he said in sport, with his eyes fixed upon mine. "Has some thought of death come to make you afraid?"
"No; I was thinking of Martha."
His bantering humour left him at once.
"Oh! for once in our lives surely we might learn to think only of ourselves," he said, and his tone showed that he was vexed with me.
"And have you found that lesson so very hard to learn?"
"That's unkind of you," he whispered, and closed my mouth with a kiss. …
