Book Three The Afterglow Chapter 1 Death, Life, and Love

Suddenly she pushed him back, panting. She had gone white; she trembled in his clasp.

"Oh, your kiss--oh, Allan, what is this I feel?--it seems to choke me!" she gasped, clutching her full bosom where her heart leaped like a prisoned creature. "Your kiss--it is so different now! No, no--not again--not yet!"

He released her, for he, too was shaking in the grip of new, fierce passions.

"Forgive me!" he whispered. "I--I forgot myself, a moment. Not yet--no, not yet. You're right, Beatrice. A thousand things are pressing to be done. And love--must wait!"

He clenched his fists and strode to the edge of the chasm, where, for a while, he stood alone and silent, gazing far down and away, mastering himself, striving to get himself in leash once more.

Then suddenly he turned and smiled.

"Come, Beta," said he. "All this must be forgotten. Let's get to work. The whole world's waiting for us, for our labor. It's eager for our toil!"

She nodded. In her eyes the fire had died, and now only the light of comradeship and trust and hope glowed once again.

"Allan?"

"Yes?"

"Our first duty--" She gestured toward the body of the patriarch, nobly still beneath the rough folds of the mantle they had drawn over it.

He understood.

"Yes," murmured he. "And his grave shall be for all the future ages a place of pilgrimage and solemn thought. Where first, one of lost Folk issued again into the world and where he died, this shall be a monument of the new time now coming to its birth.