The Shadow of the Past by Ethel Mills

The sunlight flooded the rondavel and played in a golden radiance about Honor's figure. The gleam of it was in her hair; it shone dazzlingly on her white dress, and sparkled with a hard brilliance on the plain gold circlet on her finger. Matheson caught the glint of the ring, and from that moment it seemed to him that all the light in the room became contracted and centred in that narrow band, darting forth its refracted rays with a fiery challenge that hurt the eyes.

He put up a hand to shut out the sinister gleam of it, and lay quiet and in silence. Honor had risen and moved away from the bed. She stood with her face partly averted, watching the beauty of the sunrise through the uncurtained open window. An immense embarrassment held her, an embarrassment that made itself felt and in which the man shared. A sense of wrongdoing robbed them both of all pleasure in that long caress in the dawn, when their lips had met and lingered in the first kiss they had interchanged. He had kissed her once before on the brow; that kiss had been one of renunciation; the kiss he had given her that morning held the quality of passion in its eager warmth, a passion to which the woman was not insensible, to which she had in a measure responded. It had been the act of a moment in obedience to the impulse of the moment, and it left them both a little overcome and excited and enormously self-conscious.