It was the first time they had called each other by their first names. It was the first time that the gradually ripening intimacy between them had had a more propitious setting than a table at Sherry's. Paul Burton had awaited this moment patiently, knowing that it must sometime come. Now he bent toward her until her hair brushed his face.
"It is your right to find life a thing of joy," he whispered. "Your soul is a flower. It should have the fulness and radiance of sunshine."
"Our rights," she said slowly, "are not always the things we get."
"But just why are you unhappy?" he insisted.
"I guess you summed it up in that one word, Paul ... captivity."
Paul Burton, the easily swayed, the facilely led, rose and paced up and down, and after a few moments he halted before her.
"Doesn't he--your jailer--appreciate you, Loraine?"
She shrugged her lovely shoulders and looked up at him, smiling through lashes that glistened a little.
"As much, I suppose, as a man can appreciate a woman whom he fails to understand. It's not his fault."
Loraine Haswell shot him a quick inquiring glance. "Yes," she smiled, "he cares enough to persecute me with little jealousies. He cares enough to want me to make love to him when--" she halted and put both hands over her face; through her slight figure ran a faint shudder--"when I can't."
The man pressed his tapering fingers to his temples. He must seem agitated and his emotions lay so ready to call that seeming so was almost being so. Yet in the back of his mind was the thought: "She will be in my arms in five minutes."
Suddenly she rose from her seat. "I oughtn't to say such things to you," she declared in a voice freighted with self-accusation. "Please forget it, Paul. But it's a thing you can understand. You know the emptiness of a life that deals only with material things."
He leaned forward with one knee on the bench and one hand on the fountain basin. She was beautiful and his heart responded to her beauty's challenge.
"To me you can say anything. In me you will always find one who has no interest above your interests." He stopped and took her hands, but she shook her head in gentle negation, and, as he obeyed the unuttered mandate and let his own arms fall at his sides, she rewarded him with a smile that thrilled him like an embrace.