“You would, Mary,” he said softly. She nodded. He took her suddenly in his arms. “You love me, Mary. Say you love me, Mary.” “I love you, Dan,” she breathed on his lips. They kissed passionately, with strange abandonment. Then they sat for a minute, with their cheeks together, hardly conscious of anything but of a strange exaltation that was undefinable. A hot feeling of joyous exaltation pervaded their bodies. But it was not the exaltation of love. It was an abandoned sadness born of grief. The grief of two human souls clinging together for solace. It was beautiful and pure like love, that exaltation, born of fear, and of the eternal melancholy of the entramelled Irish soul, struggling in bondage. For Mary perhaps, it was almost pure mating love. For she loved that gentle voice, the last remnant of the gentle nature, that had been devoured in the struggle of life and replaced by a cold, callous, ambitious nature. She loved, but she only loved a phantom, a shy ghost come for an hour of the night, to fly from the dawn. But for Gallagher, his caresses were a mask. He had hidden behind his gentle nature for the moment, as behind a mask, to rest and plot. Men like him always lean on women for support in moments of extreme danger. Even as he sat with her arms about him, with her breathing words of love on his lips, he was thinking, not of her, but of the great danger that confronted him. Would Gypo inform again before he was caught? At length, with a low exclamation he got to his feet, releasing himself hurriedly from her embrace. He clenched his fists. “Mary,” he said without looking at her, “you see how I need you. I need somebody to talk to, somebody to trust. There is nobody else but you I can trust, Mary. And I don’t know why I trust you.” He paused. She was not listening. She was suffering a reaction from her exaltation. Why was he talking like this? A lover did not talk like this. He was only thinking of himself.