during the whole future be broken save by a disloyalty. A disloyalty,
she divined, would irrevocably destroy it. But she had no fear on that
score, for she knew her own nature. His decision did more than fill
her with a dizzy sense of relief, a mad, intolerable happiness--it
re-established her self-respect. No ordinary woman, handicapped as she
was, could have captured this fastidious and shy paragon ... And the
notion that her passion for him had dwindled was utterly ridiculous,
like the notion that he would tire of her. She was saved. She burst
into wild tears.

"Ah! Pardon me!" she sobbed. "I am quite calm, really. But since the
air-raid, thou knowest, I have not been quite the same ... Thou! Thou
art different. Nothing could disturb thy calm. Ah! If thou wert a
general at the front! What sang-froid! What presence of mind! But I--"

He bent towards her, and she suddenly sprang up and seized him round
the neck, and ate his lips, and while she strangled and consumed him
she kept muttering to him:

"Hope not that I shall thank thee. I cannot. I cannot! The words with
which I could thank thee do not exist. But I am thine, thine! All of
me is thine. Humiliate me! Demand of me impossible things! I am thy
slave, thy creature! Ah! Let me kiss thy beautiful grey hairs. I love
thy hair. And thy ears ..."

The thought of her insatiable temperament flashed through her as
she held him, and of his northern sobriety, and of the profound,
unchangeable difference between these two. She would discipline
her temperament; she would subjugate it. Women were capable of
miracles--and women alone. And she was capable of miracles.