She forgets everything but him and the giant fact that he is hers. In spite of her peculiar nature and practical turn, she has pictured, like most of her sex, a paradise of love about this man, and lost in the golden vision of Love’s paradise gained, she lets her usual scepticism slip out of her mind, and only knows that Lord Delaval, whom she has worshipped for three years with the feverish fierceness of her Bedouin nature, _is_ wooing her--strangely and abruptly, but in the sweetest, subtlest way that a man can woo. Gabrielle is sharp as a needle, yet it never crosses her brain in her lovesick frenzy that _real_ feeling is _not_ eloquent in expression, and that when a man _really_ craves anything and trembles lest he should not grasp it, flowers of rhetoric are usually denied to his tongue. She sits spellbound, with drooping lids. Literally _nothing_ seems to live in her, save a vivid sense of his words, and the intensity of their meaning. Her keen intelligence is lulled to sleep, her habit of doubting is dead, _pro tem_. She does not try to subject his protestations to any analytical process; they only seem to float through her mind in a kind of soft mist, and she sits white now and silent, and feeling, as she thinks she can never feel again, content, almost in a dream, and yet full, awfully full, of an intensified vitality. “I want to tell you, Gabrielle,” Lord Delaval says very low, while his audacious arm steals round her magnificent shoulders and her crimson cheek is pillowed on his breast, “that I love you as no one has ever loved you, and that I am _determined_ to win from you all that I wish! I have _never_ been baulked yet, if I determined to reach anything. If I preserve my will intact, I shall not accept anything but the _whole_ from you, the _whole_, sweetheart--do you hear? Of your heart and soul and body I will have all--_all!_ or die unsatisfied. My hope to gain all this is by knowledge of your nature. It is you--_you_ that I love, not a part of you, not an ideal being of you, not what you represent to other men’s eyes, but what you are with your thousand imperfections, even blots. Nothing, Gabrielle, will change me towards you, for I have only given you what is yours by the law of affinity, and you, Gabrielle--well, I _defy_ you to say that you are not wholly and solely _mine_.” It is masterful wooing this, insolent in fact, and it would revolt most women. Zai and even Baby, with her fast proclivities, would not understand it, and it would jar on their thoroughbred natures, but Gabrielle likes it. The whole thing fascinates her--a visible shiver runs over her. Lord Delaval feels the shiver, and his arm draws her more closely to him, while the ghost of a cynical smile crosses his mouth. He stoops his head and looks full into her eyes, and then his lips rest upon hers, long and passionately, while her heart beats as wildly as a bird in the grasp of a fowler.