"You love me?" she asked, with a moan of inarticulate abandonment. "Love you, love you, love you, Alves," he repeated in savage iteration. "Now,--" he kissed her lips. They were no longer cold. "You are mine, mine, do you understand? Nothing shall touch you. _That_ has passed!" For a moment she looked at him in question. But instantly her face smiled in content, and she flashed back his passion. She kissed him, drawing him down closer and closer into her warm self. With this long kiss a new love put forth its strength, not the pale beatitude of his dream, with its sweet wistfulness, its shy desires. That was large and vague and insubstantial, permeating like an odor the humdrum purlieus of the day. This was savage, triumphant, that leaped like flame from his heart to his mouth, that burned blood-red on the black night. It swept away hesitation, a sick man's nicety and doubts, all the prejudices of all times! This was love, unchained, that came like waters from the mountains to quench the thirst of blazing deserts: parched, dry, in dust; now slaked and yet ever thirsty. "How could it have been otherwise," he murmured, more to himself than to her. "What?" she asked, startled, withdrawing herself. "Don't think, don't think!" he exclaimed, in fear of the ebbing of the waters. Her doubts were calmed, and she yielded to his insistence, slipping into his arms with an unintelligible cry, the satisfied note of desire. For all the waiting of the empty years came this rich payment--love that satisfied, that could never be satisfied. * * * * * In the first light of the morning the Ducharme woman, creeping from her room in the rear, caught sight of them. Mrs. Preston's head was lying on the doctor's arm, while he knelt beside the table, watching her pale face in its undisturbed sleep. At the footfall, he roused her gently. Mrs. Ducharme hastily drew back. She, too, did not seem to have passed a peaceful night. Her flabby fat face was sickly white, and she trembled as she opened the side door to the hot morning sun. She threw some small thing into the waste by the door; then looking around to see that she was not observed, she hurled with all her strength a long bottle toward the swamp across the fence. The bottle fell short of the swamp, but it sank among the reeds and the fleurs-de-lys of the margin. Then the woman closed the door softly. CHAPTER XXIII