it is full—full. From end to end of it, it is you—you and my love for you."
Lucia stood quite silent a moment, looking at him with mouth a little open, startled and surprised. Cool and calculating as she had been throughout, yet when this came, there was something deadly serious about it. Often she had imagined to herself what she would say when the much-to-be-desired moment came, and she had in these sketches of her fancy been quite up to the mark. But now, though what he felt was unintelligible to her, she knew that to him it was something tremendous; the hurried, stammered words showed her that, and it a little frightened her. It was not smooth and romantic and polished; there was something fierce and elemental in it.
"Oh, Lord Brayton!" she said very feebly.
He took hold of both her hands, grasping them hard.
"I can't do without you," he said; "it's no use. You are for me; do you understand?"
Lucia was furious with herself; she had not foreseen that it would be like this. All that he felt was leagues above her head, since, for the time, anyhow, he had got completely outside himself, and she had no idea what to say. The softly murmured "yes," the averting of the head, the faint blush, and the gradually growing radiant smile, all of which she could have managed beautifully, she knew to be so utterly off the point as to be ludicrous, and she simply stood there mute and helpless. She did not know her part, and her heart, which was the only possible prompter, appeared not to be in its place. It struck her that her assurance that she did not always monopolize the conversation was being most inconveniently demonstrated. She had expected (and had provided for) some declaration which would be cultivated and decorous, and perhaps a little self-centred, with an allusion as to how wonderfully she would further and assist the aims which they had talked over together; but instead of this he told her that she was his with a suppressed violence which the suppression made more potent.
"Lucia, you know it too," he said, still savagely; "I swear you know it too. There is no separate existence possible for either of us."
But Lucia just made a gesture of appeal to him.
"Ah, don't, don't!" she said. "I am frightened."
Somewhere deep inside her she knew that if she only had passion on her side to meet his, the whole thing would be the
