She hid her face in her hands, hid it from the stars and the shrouding
dark, tremulously abashed at the wonderful significance of love.
She almost laughed to think how she had allowed so small a thing as the
secret which Max could not tell her to corrode and eat into the heart
of happiness. Looking back from the standpoint she had now gained, it
seemed so pitifully mean and paltry, a profanation of the whole inner,
hidden meaning of love.
So long as she and Max cared for each other, nothing else mattered,
nothing in the whole world. And the long battle between love and
pride--between love, that had turned her days and nights into one
endless ache of longing to return to Max, and pride, that had barred
the way inflexibly--was over, done with.
Love had won, hands down. She would go back to Max, and all thought
that it might be weak-minded of her, humiliating to her self-respect,
was swept aside. Love, the great teacher, had brought her through the
dark places where the lesser gods hold sway, out into the light of day,
and she knew that to return to Max, to give herself afresh to him,
would be the veritable triumph, of love itself.
She would go back, back to the shelter of his love which had been
waiting for her all the time, unswerving and unreproaching. She had
read it in his eyes when they had met her own an hour ago.
"I want you---body and soul I want you!" he had told her there by the
cliffs at Culver.
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