They stood there silent; the man knew that he ought to go at once; that in that silence the feeling which words had so thinly covered would break through and take them. But knowing he should go seemed without power to make him go. He watched the girl's slightly averted face. He knew why it was averted. He felt sure that he was not alone in what he felt. And so he stood there in the sweetness of that knowing, the sweetness of that understanding why she held herself almost rigid like that, feeling surging higher in him in the thought that she too was fighting feeling. The breeze moved the hair on her temples; he could see the throb in her uncovered throat, her thin white dress moving over her quick breathing. Life was in her, and the desire for life. She seemed so tender, so sensitive. He moved a step nearer her, unable to deny himself the sweetness of confirming what it was so wonderful to think. "I won't be taking you home tomorrow night," he said. She looked at him, then swiftly turned away, but not before he had seen her eyes. "Shall you care?" he pressed it, unsteadily. He knew by her high head, her tenseness, that she was fighting something back; and he saw the quivering of her tender mouth. She cared! She _did_ care. Here was a woman who cared; a woman who wanted love--his love; a woman for whom life counted, as it counted for him. After barren, baffled days, days of denial and humiliation, the sweetness of being desired possessed him overwhelmingly as they stood there in the still, fragrant night before the darkened house. He knew that he must go; he _had_ to go; it was go now, or--. But still he just stood there, unable to do what he knew he should do, reason trying to get hold of that moment of gathering passion, training striving to hold life. It was she who brought them together. With a smothered passionate little sob she had swayed toward him, and then she was in his arms and he was kissing her wet eyes, that tender mouth, the slim throbbing throat. CHAPTER NINE There followed three years of happiness wrung from wretchedness, years in which the splendor of love would blaze through the shame of concealment, when joy was always breaking out through fear, when moments of beautiful peace trembled there in the ugly web of circumstance. Life was flooded with beauty by a thing called shameful.