But confusing sensations dulled the girl to his prayer--sensations of vehement rebellion, of incompleteness within sweet proximity of all, of a vast sadness and vaster joy. She shook with the shudder that shook him. Her hands drew his head to a resting place where the robe had fallen from her breast. She felt him relax in her arms; realized that his lips had touched, then drawn away from hers, as if offended by the contact. “God help me.... More than my honor.” She scarcely heard his words, so low were they rasped. The next moment he spoke plainly, although in a hoarse, hurried voice. “Who do you suppose made the law that I am trying to obey? To be born with passions like mine, to hold them in leash all my life because of the righteous hope my mother taught me of this moment and you, then to try to convince myself that it is all a lie for which I have lived--that love is less than law---- If God Almighty made it----” “No. Man must have made that law,” the girl interrupted. “Don’t you feel, John, that love is right? I don’t know God, but I know you. Can’t you believe that way in me?” “_Dolores!_” With worshipful reproach, he gave her the vow she asked. “With my mind, my heart, my body I believe in you. I always shall believe.” Wonderingly he looked at her lips; saw on them for the first time a smile. Timidly yet bravely, it rewarded and further tempted him. “Then kiss me. Then love me,” she panted. “Oh, I want so to kiss you--to love you. I didn’t know how much until----” A strand of her hair fell across the smiling lips--across temptation. Although so tenuous and soft, it was a barrier between him and that from which he had plead to be saved. His hand shook from his hurry to brush it aside. The more greedily for its interference, his lips lowered to those lips that were tempting him; sank to them; found the complete answer they had sought in vain to speak. Dolores’ body was lifted into an embrace which would have been cruel, except for her desperate response. Her long hair drifted about them, a curtain from the light. Increasingly she felt that new sense of incompleteness, that weight of sadness and lightness of joy. Shaking from the violence aroused by her yearnings, she yet clung as if to gentleness. “How strange I feel,” she breathed. “You are my mate, Dolores.” Again: “I did not know--did not understand that love was like this.” And again he reassured her: “You are my mate.” “But is this what they felt for me, those other men? I hated them for it. I blamed them.” “No.” He deprived her lips of his that his eyes might blaze the indignant denial into her eyes. “Their passion was lust. Yours is the fragrance of the rose--the pollen of your love. Do not fear that I could misunderstand.” “Fear? If God made the rose, why fear?” she half-sobbed. “If it is not lust for you to love me, give me back your lips. Oh, kiss me, John. Oh, love me. I _belong_.” CHAPTER XVII