Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/139

 "With you?" she demanded, staring at him with slowly awakening eyes. "And where will I go with you?"

"I do not care—so long as you come," was his passionate declaration.

"Didn't I tell you there was to be no more of this?" she demanded, fixing him with a gaze as cold as glacial ice. But he seemed conscious of only one compulsion, swept by only one emotion.

"I love you!" he suddenly cried out, the words seeming to erupt from a volcano that could not be controlled.

It startled Kestner a little to see that the tears were streaming down the Neapolitan's face, that his body was shaking with the passion that swept it

Yet the girl turned studiously about and placed the silver-backed hair-brush on her dressing table. Then she stepped quietly over to where he stood, facing him fearlessly, with a brow still slightly wrinkled in thought. She opened her lips to speak. But Morello drowned her first words in his suddenly repeated cry of "I love you!" He lifted his two hands quaveringly, one on each side of her uncovered arms. They came together and touched the bare flesh. Then with a sob he seized her.

His arms went about her slender body, crushing it and drawing it in against his own. He held her, writhing and twisting, until there seemed something antediluvial and barbaric in their struggles, in the woman's cloud of tangled and tossing hair, in her gasping cry that was shut off by Morello's mouth closing over her own.