A moment so, then he fell back upon the couch, all his body quivering under the ecstasy from her parted lips, his triumphant senses rioting insolently through the gray, cold garden of his vows.
She drew a little back, her hands resting on his shoulders, and he saw again the firelight shining in her eyes and upon her lips.

Yet the eyes were now lighted with a strange, sad reluctance, even while the mutinous lips opened their inciting welcome.
He was floating--floating midway between a cold, bleak heaven of denial and a luring hell of consent; floating recklessly, as if careless to which his soul should go.
His gaze was once more upon her face, and now, in a curiously cool little second of observation, he saw mirrored there the same conflicting duality that he knew raged within himself.

In her eyes glowed the pure flame of fear and protest--but on her mad lips was the curl of provocation.

And as the man in him had waited carelessly, in a sensuous luxury of unconcern, for his soul to go where it might--far up or far down--so now the woman waited before him in an incurious, unbiassed calm--the clear eyes with their grave, stern "_No_!"-- the parted lips all but shuddering out their "_Yes_!" Still he looked and still the leaning woman waited--waited to welcome with impartial fervour the angel or the devil that might come forth.
And then, as he lay so, there started with electric quickness, from some sudden coldness of recollection, the image of Prue.

Sharp and vivid it shone from this chill of truth like a glittering star from the clean winter sky outside.