u'll see----"

"How much you love me?"

"No, no. You'll see my wrinkles. See, if I do this you can't look at my
face." And putting her arms round my neck she hid her face.

I was strangely tongue-tied, or, perhaps, not strangely; for there comes
a time when the eyes say all that there is desire or need to say. Her
pleadings were in answer to my eyes.

"Oh, I know you think so now!" she murmured. "But you won't go on
thinking so--and I shall." She raised her head and looked at me; now a
smile of triumph came on her face. "Oh, but you do think so now!" she
whispered in a voice still lower, but full of delight. "You do think so
now," and again she hid her face from me. But I knew that the triumph
had entered into her soul also, and that the shadows could no longer
altogether dim its sunshine for her.

The afternoon became full, and waned to dusk as we sat together. We said
little; there were no arrangements made; we seemed in a way cut off from
the world outside, and from the consideration of it. The life which we
must each lead, lives in the main apart from one another, had receded
into distance, and went unnoticed; we had nothing to do save to be
together; when we were together there was little that we cared to say,
no protestations that we had need to make. There was between us so
absolute a sympathy, so full an agreement in all that we gave, all that
we accepted, all that we abandoned. Doubts and struggles were as though
they had never been. There is a temptation to think sometimes that
things so perfectly justify themselves that conscience is not
discrowned by violence, but signs a willing abdication, herself
convinced. For passion can simulate right, even as in some natures the
love of right becomes a turbulent passion in the end, like most of such,
destructive of itself.

"Then I am yours, and you are mine? And the Embassy is Wetter's?"

"The Embassy is whose you like," she cried, "if the rest is true."

"It is Wetter's. Do you know why? That everybody may know how I am
yours."

She did not refuse even the perilous fame I offered.

"I should be proud of it," she said, with head erect.

"No, no; nobody shall breathe a letter of your name," I exclaimed in a
sudden turn of feeling. "I will swear that you had nothing to do with
it, that you hate him, that you never mentioned it."

"Say what you like," she whispered.

"If I did that, I should say to all Forstadt that there's no woman in
the world like you