It was the first time since their flight from America, she felt, that his affection had borne out the promise of its earlier ardor.

And it taught her two things.

One was that her woman's natural hunger for love was not so dead as she had at times imagined.

The other was that Durkin, during the last months, had drifted much further away from her than she had dreamed.

It stung her into a passionate and remorseful self-promise to keep closer to him, to make herself always essential to him, to turn and bend as he might bend and turn, but always to be with him.