e strange
to his own ears.

For he had never said them before, nor had she ever heard them, and when
they are spoken in that way they are the most wonderful words in the
world, both to speak and to hear.

The look he had so rarely seen was there now, and there was no care to
hide what was in her eyes, for she had told him all, without a word, as
women can.

"I have loved you very long," he said again, and with one hand he
pressed back her hair and smoothed it.

"I know it," she answered, gazing at him with lips just parted. "But I
have loved you longer still."

"How could I guess it?" he asked. "It seems so wonderful, so very
strange!"

"I could not say it first." She smiled. "And yet I tried to tell you
without words."

"Did you?"

She nodded as her head lay in his arm, and closed her smiling lips
tightly, and nodded again.

"You would not understand," she said. "You always made it hard for me."

"Oh, if I had only known!"

She lay quietly on his arm for a few seconds, and neither spoke. Only
the low roar of the furnace was heard in the hot stillness. Marietta
looked up steadily into his face, with unwinking eyes.

"How you look at me!" he said, with a happy smile.

"I have often wanted to look at you like this," she answered gravely.
"But until you had told me, how could I?"

He bent down rather timidly, but drawn to her by a power he could not
resist. His first kiss touched her forehead lightly, with a sort of
boyish reverence, while a thrill ran through every nerve and fibre of
his body. But she turned in his arms and threw her own suddenly round
his neck, and in an instant their lips met.

Zorzi was in a dream, where Marietta alone was real. All thought and
recollection of danger vanished, the very room was not the laboratory
where he had so long lived and worked, and thought and suffered. The
walls were gold, the stone pavement was a silken carpet, the shadowy
smoke-stained beams were the carved ceiling of a palace, he was himself
the king and master of the whole world, and he held all his kingdom in
his arms.

"You understand now," Marietta said at last, holding his face before her
with her hands.

"No," he answered lovingly. "I do not understand, I will not even try.
If I do, I shall open my eyes, and it will suddenly be daylight, and I
shall put out my hands and find nothing! I shall be alone, in my room,
just awake and aching with a horrible longing for the impossible. You do
not know