But she pressed her wrists against his cheeks till his mouth was crushed between them, and drew him closer; closer to the strange smile upon her lips--cruel, passionate, triumphant, and yet adoringly fond--which seemed to come from beyond the borders of the world he knew. Then, with a bird's swiftness, her lips were against his face, bruising it with the wildness of her kisses, as she held it in a clutch that pained him to the plundering madness of her mouth. Unable to speak, he caught her wrists to draw them from his face, but at the touch of her skin his hands lost the power to help him, and hung idly like heavy bracelets upon her arms. They had slipped to her elbows and fallen unclasped from them, when, as suddenly as she had seized it, she thrust his face from her to the full length of her arms and held it there, gazing into it with the fury of despoiled possession, which had the same savage strangeness as her smile. Caragh's eyes were gravely distressed. "Don't, don't!" he pleaded. Then she opened her hands and threw his face out of them away from her, with a little low crying laugh horrible to hear, and sat, leaning sideways and motionless, her head propped on her wrist, looking away from him across the back of the lounge. Caragh merely straightened himself in the corner where she had flung him. He did not turn to look at her, and said nothing. There was something in what had happened past explaining; its very lawlessness made it natural, put it outside of everything, in a place by itself where there were no measurements, where there was no proportion. He was unconscious of any surprising experience, and did not give a thought to what might be passing in the girl's mind. And she, sitting there with that wrecked air of passion, seemed as utterly indifferent how she appeared to him. "You were right," he said at length, looking straight before him: "I've done it all for myself." She gave him, without turning, a glance from her exhausted eyes, but took no further notice. "I'm going back because I _daren't_ fail her. I think too little of myself, God knows, to risk thinking less. Can you understand that? I was falling lower and lower, losing hope that I could ever be constant to anything that loved me. Then she came. It hadn't mattered with the others. I was only something to them that any one could be. But she was different--different because she had never loved before, and I meant everything to her that love can mean to a woman's life, everything that is sacred and tender and divine. And I saw in keeping her love pure and happy the one thing that could lift me out of the pit and let me look myself in the face again. It's the one chance that's been given me, and if I can't take it I'm done for. Yes, it's sheer selfishness, as you said; but I'm going back to her. Do you understand?" She did not move nor look round at him. "You love me," she said dully. "It makes no difference," he answered.