What were questions of breed or birth or color now, when she knew he loved her?
Mere vapors that vanished with the first flutter of warm wings.
Nor did Meade Burrell recall his recent self-conquest or pause to reason why he should not love this little wisp of the wilderness.

The barriers he had built went down in the sight and touch of his love and disappeared; his hesitation and infirmity seemed childish now--yes, more than that, cowardly.

He realized all in a moment that he had been supremely selfish, that his love was a covenant, a compact, which he had entered into with her and had no right to dissolve without her consent, and, strangely enough, now that he acknowledged the bond to himself, it became very sweet and satisfying.
"Your lips cling so that I can't get free," sighed the girl, at last.
"You never shall," he whispered.

But when she smiled up at him piteously, her eyes swimming, and said, "I must," he wrenched himself away and let her go.
As he went lightly towards the barracks through the far-stretching shadows, for the moon was yellow now, Meade Burrell sighed gladly to himself.

Again his course ran clear and straight before him though wholly at variance with the one he had decided upon so recently.