dn't ask a woman to come and share with me an income of sixpence a
week. Especially as I have grounds for believing that she's in rather
affluent circumstances herself. Oh, I wish I were rich!" He repeated
this aspiration in a groan.

"Poor, poor young man!" she commiserated him, while her eyes, which she
held perseveringly averted, were soft with sympathy and gay with mirth.
"When do you begin your gardening?"

"Oh, don't mock me!" he cried, with an imploring gesture. "You know,
joking apart, that it's child's play for a man of my age, with no
profession and no special talent, to fancy he can turn to and earn
money. I might, if I made supernatural exertions, and if Fortune went
out of her way to favour me, add a maximum of another sixpence to my
weekly budget. No, there's never a hope for me on sea or land. I must
e'en bear it, though I cannot grin withal."

"Ah, well," said Maria Dolores, to comfort him, "these attacks, I have
read, are often as short as they are sharp. Let us trust you'll soon
rally from this one. How long have they generally lasted in the past?"

John's face grew dark with upbraiding; the sea-blue of his eyes, the
gold of his hair and beard, the pink of his complexion visibly grew
dark.

"You are so needlessly unkind," he said, "that you don't deserve to hear
the true answer to your question."

She studied the half-obliterated fresco on the wall beside her.

"All the same," said he, "you _shall_ hear it. If falling in love were
my habit, no doubt I shouldn't take it so hard. But the simple truth,
though I am thirty years old, is that I have never before felt so much
as a heart-flutter for any woman. And, since you cite your reading, _I_
have read that a fire which may merely singe the surface of green wood,
will entirely consume the dry."

She continued to study the ancient painting. Her fingers were playing
with the ends of her lace veil.

"Besides," he went on, "if I had been in love a dozen times, it wouldn't
signify. For I should have been in love with ordinary usual human
women. They're the only sort I ever met--till I met her. She's of a
totally different order--as distinct from them as ... What shall
I say? Oh, as unlike them as starfire is unlike dull clay.
Starfire--starfire--the wonderful, high, white-burning starfire of her
spirit, that's the thing that strikes you most in her. It shines through
her. It shines in her eyes, it shines in her hair, her adorable, soft,
dark, warm a