I pray you--" Her voice had sunk to a whisper, and now it failed.

Then she seemed to get into his arms, to wind herself around him, her hair loosened, her face upturned, white and spent, her arms blindly circling his neck.

She was all love, all surrender, all supreme appeal, and these, without her beauty, would have made her wonderful.

But her beauty! Would not Steele have been less than a man or more than a man had he been impervious to it?
She was like some snow-white exquisite flower, broken, and suddenly blighted.

She was a woman then in all that made a woman helpless--in all that made her mysterious, sacred, absolutely and unutterably more than any other thing in life.