Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/254

244 He took her in his arms and held her close as he murmured, "As certain as life!"

He kissed her again, this time more appropriately, more masterfully. And with it a lifetime of repression went up in flames.

"I love you," she said, her grim Keswick candor once more asserting itself. "I'll always have to love you, whatever happens." She turned away from him a little and stared toward the shadowy front of the old manor-house. "I don't care so much now what they say."

"Why should you?" he demanded, realizing how little he had thought of the world beyond that arbor.

"This is my only home," she told him, quite simply. "I can live here only by doing what is demanded of me."

"But when those demands are absurd?"

"That doesn't seem to have made much difference."

"But you're—you're a woman now, and you have your human rights."

"That's easy to say," she told him.