But long repression, and the knowledge that was poisoning his perfect hour, constrained him to reticence. He dared not let himself go. "I think I do realise . . . now . . ." she whispered, stirred to the depths by the repressed intensity of his tone. "Then don't belittle yourself any more. I forbid it. You understand?" Again he heard the low laugh on which her soul seemed to ride. Then, leaning impulsively down to him, she put her bare arms round his shoulders from behind, and rested her cheek upon his hair. The man held his breath, and remained very still, as if fearful lest word or movement should break the spell. After five years of unloved loneliness, this first spontaneous caress from his wife, with its delicate suggestion of intimacy, seemed to break down invisible barriers and set new life coursing in his veins. "You forbid it?" she echoed, on a tremulous note of happiness. "And you have the right to. You, and no one else in all the world! You laughed at me in the old days--do you remember?--for clutching at my independence. Well, I have had my surfeit of it now; and I am desperately tired of standing alone . . . darling." She paused before the unfamiliar word, unconsciously accentuating its effect, and Lenox, taking her two hands in one of his own, kissed them fervently. The moment he dreaded was upon him, and in the face of her impassioned tenderness he scarcely knew how to meet it. "You should not stand alone one minute longer, if I could have my will," he said in a repressed voice. She lifted her head and looked at him. "And why can't you have your will? What are we going to do about it, Eldred?" "Nothing in a hurry," he answered slowly. "We paid too dearly for that last time." "But, _mon cher_ . . . we have waited five whole years." "That is just the difficulty. Five years of overwork and bitterness of spirit are not to be wiped out in a single hour; even such an hour as this. The man you married had not gone through the fire, and been badly burned in the process." He paused. The irony of their reversed positions stung him to the quick, and she sat watching his face. The pallor of moonlight intensified its ruggedness, its deep indentations of cheek and brow. She began to be aware that the dropped stitches of life cannot always be picked up again at will; that there is no tyrant more pitiless than the Past; and a vague dread took hold of her, sealing her lips.