got down from the couch and walked to a window. When the lights had
been brought into the room all the panes had turned inky black; for the
night had come and the garden was full of tall bushes and trees screening
off the gas lamps of the main alley of the Prado. Whatever the question
meant she was not likely to see an answer to it outside. But her whisper
had offended me, had hurt something infinitely deep, infinitely subtle
and infinitely clear-eyed in my nature. I said after her from the couch
on which I had remained, "Don't lose your composure. You will always
have some sort of bell at hand."

I saw her shrug her uncovered shoulders impatiently. Her forehead was
against the very blackness of the panes; pulled upward from the
beautiful, strong nape of her neck, the twisted mass of her tawny hair
was held high upon her head by the arrow of gold.

"You set up for being unforgiving," she said without anger.

I sprang to my feet while she turned about and came towards me bravely,
with a wistful smile on her bold, adolescent face.

"It seems to me," she went on in a voice like a wave of love itself,
"that one should try to understand before one sets up for being
unforgiving. Forgiveness is a very fine word. It is a fine invocation."

"There are other fine words in the language such as fascination,
fidelity, also frivolity; and as for invocations there are plenty of
them, too; for instance: alas, heaven help me."

We stood very close together, her narrow eyes were as enigmatic as ever,
but that face, which, like some ideal conception of art, was incapable of
anything like untruth and grimace, expressed by some mysterious means
such a depth of infinite patience that I felt profoundly ashamed of
myself.

"This thing is beyond words altogether," I said. "Beyond forgiveness,
beyond forgetting, beyond anger or jealousy. . . . There is nothing
between us two that could make us act together."

"Then we must fall back perhaps on something within us, that--you admit
it?--we have in common."

"Don't be childish," I said. "You give one with a perpetual and intense
freshness feelings and sensations that are as old as the world itself,
and you imagine that your enchantment can be broken off anywhere, at any
time! But it can't be broken. And forgetfulness, like everything else,
can only come from you. It's an impossible situation to stand up
against."

She listened with slightly parted lips as if to catch some fu