She stepped back, staring rather wildly. Her hand flew up to her mouth, but that was no defense, for mischief and delight were brimming over, uncontrollable. As Ben himself began to chuckle, she gave way to it completely, throwing back her head, pointing at him helplessly, the laugh going up and up in a golden rocket. "_Oh, le peigne, le peigne, le bon Dieu me garde!_ Whoo!" Clarissa wailed, and slapped her thigh, and swayed toward him--sobering completely as Ben's arm went around her waist, but not drawing away, studying him a while with a dark and new sweet gravity, then at last taking the brandy glass, turning it about so that when she raised it the small mark left by his lips was covered by her own as she drained it. The glass dropped to the floor from her drooping hand; Ben felt she would not have cared if the lovely thing had broken, or perhaps she wished it to break, but it did not. "_Une heure, fugitive et immortelle, une heure et alors----_" "I have no French." Ben's fingers lost themselves in her dark sweet-smelling hair. "My dear, what art thou saying?--tell me." "Ah, little or nothing," Clarissa mumbled. She unfastened his shirt, her fingers swift and petulant, until she could rub her cheek over his bare skin; her mouth groped for his nipple and clung lightly a second with soft pressure of her teeth. "One hour, I think I said, one hour and then nothing more, because you will go away, because one hour given by chance is all we may have, _mais ton sourire_--but your smile I shall yet see, as I saw it first when you gave it to my little Charity there at the wharf, and I could look into you and know you, and my loins hurt me and my empty flesh, and my silly heart cried out I love you, I love you." Her hand sought for his wrist and clutched it hard. She spoke in a breathless tone like anger: "Come to my room!" It was small, and bleak, and very clean, a room under the eaves with not even a bed but a pallet on the floor, a chair, a few hooks on the wall for her few garments. As he followed her half blindly, Ben had received a dim impression of passing, on the second floor, the open doorway of some luxurious room. It didn't matter. In her room she turned to him, suddenly grave but no less urgent. A small laugh came and passed like a breeze, impatient, as she helped him with his clothes and her own, her hands a bridge of warmth between them. Slowness he felt then in the upward reaching of her mouth to find his lips. She was embracing him, a small column of urgent softness, and slipping down, kneeling, falling away--a slow and graceful falling until she lay on the pallet at his feet, no longer looking at him but knowing he would come to her.