A rising fear and a great solicitude laid a finger upon his craving embrace of her; he had a sense of something strangely different in her, of the unknown irremediable.

Yet she was there, in his arms, as she had never been before; her plight but made her in a manner sweeter; the storm that brought her barricaded them in the empty spaces of the street with a divinely entreating solitude.

He had been prepared to meet her in the lighted decorum of her father's house and he knew what he should say.
He was not prepared to take her out of the tempest, helpless and weeping and lost for the harbour of his heart, and nothing could he say.

He locked his lips against all that came murmuring to them.

But his arms tightened about her and he drew her into the shelter of a wall that jutted out in the irregular street; and there they stood and clung together in a long, close, broken silence that covered the downfall of her spirit.