Part Four - Marise Looks and Sees What is There

July 24.

Not since his fiery, ungovernable youth had Vincent felt anything like
the splendid surge of rich desire and exultant certainty which sent him
forward at a bound along the wood-road into which he had seen Marise
turn. The moment he had been watching for had come at last, after these
three hideous days of sudden arrest and pause. The forced inaction had
been a sensation physically intolerable to him, as though he had been
frozen immobile with every nerve and muscle strained for a great leap.

He felt himself taking the leap now, with such a furious, triumphant
sense of power released, that he came up beside her like a wind in the
forest, calling her name loudly, his hands outflung, his face glowing,
on fire with joy and his need for her.

For an instant he was dumfounded by the quiet face she turned on him, by
his instant perception of a profound change in her, by an expression in
her long dark eyes which was new to him, which he felt to be ominous to
him. But he was no untried boy to be cast down or disconcerted by sudden
alterations of mood in a woman. He was a man, with a man's trained
tenacity of purpose and experienced quickness of resource.

He wasted no time. "What has happened to you?" he demanded, peremptorily
as by right to know, and with the inner certainty of over-riding it,
whatever it was.