Yet I can understand now why you love them.
They are very beautiful, unset that way." He looked at her deeply. "But
I believe it is for some reason deeper than that that they have a
fascination for you. You are like them."
She let them fall like drops of rainbow water through her fingers; then
she lifted her lashes. "Am I hard and cold like them?" She sent darting
and dazzling full in his eyes her baffling, heart-shivering smile.
He did not answer at once, and she, still gazing at him, saw that he
paled visibly, every tinge of color receding from his face; his eyes,
deep and dark, held hers, as if reading her soul and demanding that she
reveal the strange secrets of her nature.
The forces of life ready to burst through the harsh crust of the earth
without and express themselves in the innocent glory of flower and grass
and tender, green leaves, and the sound of birds, were now seeking
expression through denser and more complex human avenues. All the love,
all the longing which Seagreave had so sternly suppressed during these
days he and Pearl had spent together, rose in his heart and threatened
to sweep away in a mighty tide of elemental impulses all of those
resolutions of restraint to which he had clung so hardly.
He arose and leaned his arm on the mantel-piece, still gazing at her as
if he could never withdraw his eyes. "You are so--so beautiful," he
stammered, scarcely knowing what he said. "The world will claim you. You
have so much to give it and all your nature, all your heart turns to it.
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