And she made a little virginal gesture of pain which sent Wat's arms about her in a moment. He could not answer her in words. But he was wiser, for instead their lips drew together. He kept his eyes on hers as their faces closed each on the other. His head reeled with the imagined sweetness. He seemed to remember nothing but her eyes, and how they were ocean-deep and world-large. He felt that he could plunge into them as into the sea from an overhanging cliff. But just ere their lips met Kate suddenly dropped her head against his breast. "Wat!" she whispered, intensely, "tell me--you heard what I said when I thought you had come to me in a dream--that--that I loved you and wanted you to return to me? You will never think less of me, never love me less for my words, nor for letting you love me thus?" Wat Gordon laughed a low, secure, satisfied laugh deep down in his throat. He had forgotten the watchful woman at the door, the waking enemies without, the coming dawn swiftly striding towards Suliscanna from the east, the long, dangerous passage of the sea-cavern, the perils innumerable that lay about them both. He loved, and he held his love all securely in his arms. She questioned of his love, and he felt that he could answer her. "My love," he whispered, "I love you so that all things--life, death, eternity--are the same to me. Nothing weighs in the scale when set to balance you. I loved you, Kate, when I thought you must hate me for my folly and wickedness. How shall I love you now, when your sweetest words of this night are writ in fire on my heart? But all is one--I love you, and I love you, and I love you!" The girl sighed the satisfied sigh of one who listens to that which she desires to hear and knows that she will hear, yet who for very love's sake must needs hear it again and yet again. And her arms also went tremblingly about him, and they twain that had been sundered so long, kissed their first kiss--the kiss of surrender that comes but once, and then only to the pure and worthy. The dewy warmth and fragrance of her lips, the heady rapture of the unexpected meeting so thrilled his heart and dominated his senses that broad day might well have stolen upon them and found the lovers so, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot." But the voice of Bess Landsborough from the doorway caused them to start suddenly apart with a shock of loss like the snapping of a limb. Yet it was a kindly voice, and one full of infinite sympathy for those who, like Wat and Kate, were ready to count all things well lost for love.