Her first impulse was to fold her arms about him, drawing that lined and altered face against her bosom, hiding from sight the stark bitterness of the eyes that met her own, and comforting him as only the woman who loves a man knows how. Then, like a black, surging flood, the memory of all that kept them apart rushed over her and she drew back her arms, half-raised, falling limply to her sides. He made no effort to approach her. Only his eyes remained fixed on her, hungrily devouring every line of the beloved face. "Why did you come?" she asked at last. Her voice seemed to herself as though it came from a great distance. It sounded like someone else speaking. "I couldn't keep away. Life without you has become one long, unbearable hell." He spoke with a strange, slow vehemence which seemed to hold the aggregated bitterness and pain of all those solitary months. A shudder ran through her slight frame. Her own agony of separation had been measurable with his. "But you said . . . at Tintagel . . . that we mustn't meet again. You shouldn't have come--oh, you shouldn't have come!" she cried tremulously. He drew a step nearer to her. "I _had_ to come, I'm a man--not a saint!" he answered. She looked up swiftly, trying to read what lay behind the harsh repression in his tones. She felt as though he were holding something in leash--something that strained and fought against restraint. "_I'm a man--not a saint_!" The memory of his renunciation at King Arthur's Castle swept over her. "Yet I once thought you--almost that, Peter," she said slowly. But he brushed her words aside. "Well, I'm not. When I saw you to-day at the studio . . . God! Did you think I'd keep away? . . . Nan, did you _want_ me to?" The leash was slipping. She trembled, aching to answer him as her whole soul dictated, to tell him the truth--that she wanted him every minute of the day and that life without him stretched before her like a barren waste. "I--we--oh, you're making it so hard for me!" she said imploringly. "Please go--go, now!" Instead, he caught her in his arms, holding her crushed against his breast. "No, I'm not going. Oh, Nan--little Nan that I love! I can't give you up again. Beloved!--Soul of me!" And all the love and longing, against which he had struggled unavailingly throughout those empty months of separation, came pouring from his lips in a torrent of passionate pleading that shook her heart.