He had caught her up, too, and was carrying her to altitudes far beyond
her own powers. He might drop her, but if he did, it wouldn't be through
weakness. At what he said about riding on the backs of one's own
passions, her imagination varied the picture so that she saw him
galloping splendidly by.

At that, suddenly and to her consternation, she felt her eyes flushing
up with tears. She tried to blink them away, but they came too fast.

Presently he stopped short in his walk--stopped talking, with a gasp,
in the middle of a sentence, and looked into her face. She couldn't see
his clearly, but she saw his hands clench and heard him draw a long
breath. Then he turned abruptly and walked to the window and for a
mortal endless minute, there was a silence.

At last she found something--it didn't matter much what--to say, and the
conversation between them, on the surface of it, was just what it had
been for the first ten minutes after he had come in. But, paradoxically,
this superficial commonplaceness only heightened the tensity of the
thing that underlay it. Something had happened during that moment while
he stood looking into her tear-flushed eyes; something momentous,
critical, which no previous experience in her life had prepared her for.

And it had happened to him, too. The memory of his silhouette as he
stood there with his hands clenched, between her and the window, would
have convinced her, had she needed convincing.

The commonplace thing she had found to say met, she knew, a need that
was his as well as hers, for breathing-space--for time for the recovery
of lost bearings. Had he not felt it as well as she--she smiled a little