air, on the blossoms, on the bowers, and it made him think, at
times, of the outer world, of his old judgments and values. He would
have had to fight for her, of course; he would have had to save her; but
it wouldn't have been because he had "re-fallen." That was a secret that
he kept from Kitty; it belonged to the contemplative region of thought,
where he was alone. And in Paradise, it seemed, one was forced to tell
only half-truths.

Their ties with the outer world were all slackened during these days. No
one knew the secret of the doomed honeymoon. The one or two friends who
dropped in upon them for a night seemed like quaint marionettes crossing
a stage that now and then they agreed to have set up before the bower.
These figures, their own relation to them, quickened the sense of
secrecy and love. Their eyes sought each other past unconscious eyes;
they had lovers' dexterities in meeting unobserved by their guests, gay
little escapades when they would run away for an hour drifting on the
river or wandering in the woods. And the formalities and chatter of
social life--all these queer people interested in queer things, people
who used the present only for the future, who were always planning and
looking forward,--made the hidden truths the sharper and sweeter.
Nothing, for the two lovers, was to go on. That was the truth that made
the marionettes so insignificant and that made their love so deep. There
was, for them, no looking forward, no adapting of means to ends. There
were no ends, or, rather, they were always at the end. And there was
nothing for them to do except to love each other.

"I feel sometimes as if we had become a Pierrot and a Pierrette,"
Holland said to her. "It's for that, I suppose, that a Pierrot is such
an uncanny and charming creature;--the future doesn't exist for him at
all."

Kitty, who had always been a literal person, and whose literalness had
now become so beautifully appropriate,--for what is literalness but a
seeing of the fact as standing still?--Kitty tried to smile but begged
him not to jest about such things.

"I'm not jesting, darling. I'm only musing on our strange state. It's
like a fairy-tale, the life we lead."

She turned her head, with the pathetic gesture grown habitual with her
of late, and hid her eyes on his shoulder. "Oh, darling," she said, "do
you hate to leave me!"

She had felt the moment of detached fancy as separative, and he had now
to soothe her passionate w