"Like this and like this," he said, kissing her fiercely. "Oh, my love! my love! why have you infected me? Why have you poured yourself into my very blood?" He had taken her by the shoulders almost roughly, arraigning her with sombre-burning eyes. "You put that face of yours in all my dreams. I go to sleep with it on my pillow; I wake up, it still is there. In the blackest night I see you as I saw you first, standing above the darkness, holding a great light in your hand. But the light is not to light my way. Get you back into your fortress as quickly as you can." He pushed her from him. "I am the enemy." "'Enemy,' 'coward'--I've another name for you," she said, trembling; "and if I have any light, it surely is for you. Dear Ethan, don't you see? Don't you see?" "See?" The moody eyes were heavy with passion. "It's all quite clear." She sat before him in the bottom of the boat, with hands clasped, and a veiled exaltation in her eyes. "We must make a compact. We Ganos are honest people; we'll play fair." "A compact?" "Yes. It will seem to other people like the common one. They'll call it marriage. It may be, we'll live a lifetime together without doing the ill you most dread doing. But if--if the worst comes to the worst, we will have had one perfect year." "What do you mean, Val?" He seized her wrists. "It's more than every man and woman gets," she cried. "And then?" "Then, according to the compact, we will go out together before--before we've opened the door--to another." With a broken cry she flung herself on his breast. "Hush, hush, child! this is all--" His eyes were full of tears. "You'll see it is the only way. No one but ourselves will pay for our being glad a little while." "Glad! Do you think you could be glad, poor child, with such an end forever before your eyes?" "Hasn't all the world that end in view? Aren't many of us glad in spite of all?" She smiled up into his face. "But can't you see that I'd rather be sad with you, than be glad with any other?" He kissed her, and then: "This is nothing but madness--and my work, too," he added, bitterly--"_my_ work." She put her fingers on his lips. "You take too much credit. It wasn't you who said, 'All mankind is under a sentence of capital punishment.' It isn't as if we could escape, you know." The old sense of all the ways being barred, of being a creature trapped, lay heavy on him. "Oh, my dear, my dear!" he said, with a weary laugh, "we ought to be less rational, or more so. You think you love me, little girl?" He laid his hands about her throat, and as he looked into the face his senses swam again. She neither spoke nor moved, but the quick, bright scarlet was in her cheek, and all her womanhood was in her eyes. "This leaping of the importunate blood," he thought, "all this heartache, because of the will to live of that creature who is never to be born; the spirit of the race, heedless of 'compacts,' clamoring for reincarnation."