Yet in this quiet wood so near to the centuries that
were before Adam was, she looked like a spirit of comedy listening till
the Spirit of the Wood should break the silence.
Ingolby felt his blood beat faster. He had a feeling that he was looking
at a wood-nymph who might flash out of his vision as a mere fantasy of
the mind. There shot through him the strangest feeling that if she were
his, he would be linked with something alien to the world of which he
was.
Yet, recalling the day at Carillon when her cheek lay on his shoulder and
her warm breast was pressed unresistingly against him, as he lifted her
from his boat, he knew that he would have to make the hardest fight of
his life if he meant not to have more of her than this brief
acquaintance, so touched by sensation and romance. He was, maybe,
somewhat sensational; his career had, even in its present restricted
compass, been spectacular; but romance, with its reveries and its
moonshinings, its impulses and its blind adventures, had not been any
part of his existence.
Hers were not the first red lips which, voluntarily or involuntarily, had
invited him; nor hers the first eyes which had sparkled to his glances;
and this triumphant Titian head of hers was not the only one he had seen.
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