! How I enveloped him in an effluent sympathy that rushed
warm from my heart! He accused himself of having disturbed my existence.
Whereas, was it not I who had disturbed his? He had fought against me, I
knew well, but fate had ordained his defeat. He had been swept away; he
had been captured; he had been caught in a snare of the high gods. And he
was begging forgiveness, he who alone had made my life worth living! I
wanted to kneel before him, to worship him, to dry his tears with my
hair. I swear that my feelings were as much those of a mother as of a
lover. He was ten years older than me, and yet he seemed boyish, and I an
aged woman full of experience, as he sat there opposite to me with his
wide, melancholy eyes and restless mouth.

'Wonderful, is it not,' he said, 'that we should be talking like this
to-night, and only yesterday we were Mr. and Miss to each other?'

'Wonderful!' I responded. 'But yesterday we talked with our eyes, and our
eyes did not say Mr. or Miss. Our eyes said--Ah, what they said can
never be translated into words!'

My gaze brooded on him like a caress, explored him with the unappeasable
curiosity of love, and blinded him like the sun. Could it be true that
Heaven had made that fine creature--noble and modest, nervous and full of
courage, impetuous and self-controlled, but, above all things, fine and
delicate--could it be true that Heaven had made him and then given him to
me, with his enchanting imperfections that themselves constituted
perfection? Oh, wonder, wonder! Oh, miraculous bounty which I had not
deserved! This thing had happened to me, of all women! How it showed, by
comparison, the sterility of my success and my fame and my worldly
splendour! I had hungered and thirsted for years; I had travelled
interminably through the hot desert of my brilliant career, until I had
almost ceased to hope that I should reach, one evening, the pool of water
and the palm. And now I might eat and drink and rest in the shade.
Wonderful!

'Why were you so late to-night?' I asked abruptly.

'Late?' he replied absently. 'Is it late?'

We both looked at the clock. It was yet half an hour from midnight.

'Of course it isn't--not _very_,' I said. I was forgetting that.
Everybody left so early.'

'Why was that?'

I told him, in a confusion that was sweet to me, how I had suffered by
reason of his failure to appear. He glanced at me with tender amaze.

'But I am fortunate to-day,' I exclaimed. 'Wa