I cried out once--a despairing prayer for help, I think it was--and then I seemed to plunge headlong down through an immensity of space until my lips found hers.

The ecstasy, the living fire, the anguish, and the torture of it have left their indelible scars upon my memory.

Even as I write the cruelly sweet poignancy of that moment is with me again--though very hateful now.
Thus I, blindly and recklessly, under the sway and thrall of that terrific and overpowering temptation.

And then there leapt in my mind a glimmer of returning consciousness: a glimmer that grew rapidly to be a blazing light in which I saw revealed the hideousness of the thing I did.

I tore myself away from her in that second of revulsion and hurled her from me, fiercely and violently, so that, staggering to the seat from which she had risen, she fell into it rather than sat down.
And whilst, breathless with parted lips and galloping bosom, she observed me, something near akin to terror in her eyes, I stamped about that room and raved and heaped abuse and recriminations upon myself, ending by going down upon my knees to her, imploring her forgiveness for the thing I had done--believing like a fatuous fool that it was all my doing--and imploring her still more passionately to leave me and to go.
She set a trembling hand upon my head; she took my chin in the other, and raised my face until she could look into it.
"If it be your will--if it will bring you peace and happiness, I will leave you now and never see you more.