"Only a little farther," he begged.

She surrendered again, hesitatingly, and they went on, more slowly than
before, until they came to where a few faint lights in the camp were
visible ahead of them.

"Now--now you must go!"

Howland turned as if to obey. In an instant the girl was at his side.

"You have not promised," she entreated. "Will you go--to-morrow?"

In the luster of the eyes that were turned up to him in the gloom
Howland saw again the strange, sweet power that had taken possession of
his soul. It did not occur to him in these moments that he had known
this girl for only a few hours, that until to-night he had heard no word
pass from her lips. He was conscious only that in the space of those few
hours something had come into his life which he had never known before;
and a deep longing to tell her this, to take her sweet face between his
hands, as they stood in the gloom of the forest, and to confess to her
that she had become more to him than a passing vision in a strange
wilderness filled him. That night he had forgotten half of the strenuous
lesson he had striven years to master; success, ambition, the mere joy
of achievement, were for the first time sunk under a greater thing for
him--the pulsating, human presence of this girl; and as he looked down
into her face, pleading with him still in its white, silent terror, he
forgot, too, what this woman was or might have been, knowing only that
to him she had opened a new and glorious world filled with a promise
that stirred his blood like sharp wine. He crushed her hands once more