Their circumstances but intensified the pleasure of the embrace. Athlyne and Joy had both felt the same communion of spirits when they embraced at their first meeting out of Ambleside when their souls had met. This had been intensified when they sat in close embrace after lunch beyond Dalry, when heart consciously beat to heart. Now it was completed in this meeting, unexpected and therefore more free and unhampered by preparatory thoughts and intentions, when body met body in a close if tentative communion. The mere paucity of raiment had force and purpose. They could each feel as they hung together closely strained, the beating of each other’s heart; the rising and falling of each other’s lungs. Their breaths commingled as they held mouth to mouth. In such delirious rapture--for these two ardent young people loved each other with a love which both held to be but the very beginning of an eternal bond and which took in every phase, actual and possible, of human beings--there was no place for forethought or afterthought. It was the hour of life which is under the guidance of Nature; to be looked forward to with keen if ignorant anticipation; and which is to be looked back on for evermore as a time when the very heavens opened and the singing of the Angelic choir came through unmuffled. For seconds, in which Time seemed to stand still, they stood body to body and mouth to mouth. The first to speak was the man: “I thought you were in England by late in the evening--and you were there all the time!” He indicated the direction by turning his eyes towards her room. His words seemed to fire her afresh. Holding him more closely to her, she leaned back from her hips and gazed at him languorously; her words dropped slowly from her opened lips: “Oh-h! If we had only known!” What exactly was in her mind she did not know--did not think of knowing--did not want to know. Perhaps she did not mean anything definite. It was only an expression of some feeling, of some want, some emotion, some longing--some primitive utterance couched in words of educated thought, as sweet and spontaneous as the singing of a bird in its native woods at springtime. Somehow, it moved Athlyne strangely. Moved the manhood of him in many ways, chiefest among them his duty of protection. It is not a commonly-received idea that man--not primitive man but the partially-completed article of a partially-completed cosmic age--is scrupulous with regard to woman. The general idea to the contrary effect is true _en gros_ but not _en detaille_. True of women; not true of a woman. An educated man, accustomed to judgment and action in matters requiring thought, thinks, perhaps unconsciously, all round him, backward as well as forward; but mainly forward. Present surroundings form his data; consequences represent the conclusion. Himself remains neutral, an onlooker, until he is called on for immediate decision and consequent action. So it was with Athlyne. His instant ejaculation: