Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/339

Rh been different—might even be different—rushed upon her in a dizzying flood. Her world seemed suddenly to become unreal, pale—she lost her grasp upon it, in the feeling that another choice had been possible. And something deep in her answered to Crayven's emotion—a deep correspondence of temperament, some sort of inevitable affinity. And a wild sense of the adventure of life, a desire to set back once more the boundaries of experience, to launch into the unfamiliar, stirred in her.

"Strange—I could have loved you," she said wonderingly.

"Then love me! Good God! if you only knew how lonely I am—how stale life seems to me! I want a little happiness before I die!"

He was sitting beside her on the turf, and now he flung himself full-length, hiding his face on his arms.

Before them the green meadow sloped sharply to the edge of a precipice, below which, two thousand feet below, lay the valley they had climbed from. Behind them lay a tiny lake, fed by a glacier, and the sheer, naked, rough walls of rock, the untrodden peaks of the range. The horizon was one round of serrated peaks. They were in absolute solitude. Far below in the valley cow-bells tinkled faintly; and a swarm of insects danced and hummed in the warm sun over the meadow-flowers.