ut how soon their song would pall upon his ear, how soon
would he sigh for the poisonous kiss of the serpents! I knew! I knew!

I stood heart-broken in the warm light that was falling through the
casement and streaming towards her face. What could I say to her? Men
harder and sterner and surer in every way of their own judgment than I
was of mine no doubt would have shaken her with harsh hands from that
dream in which she had wandered to her own destruction.

No doubt a sterner moralist than I would have had no pity, and would
have hurled on her all the weight of those bitter truths of which she
was so ignorant; would have shown her that pit of earthly scorn upon
whose brink she stood; would have torn down all that perfect, credulous
faith of hers, which could have no longer life nor any more lasting root
than the flowering creeper born of a summer's sun, and gorgeous as the
sunset's hues, and clinging about a ruin-mantling decay. Oh yes, no
doubt. But I am only weak, and of little wisdom, and never certain that
the laws and ways of the world are just, and never capable of long
giving pain to any harmless creature, least of all to her.

She seemed to rouse herself with effort to remember I was there, and
turned on me her eyes that were suffused and dreamful with happiness,
like a young child's with sleep.

"I must have seemed so thankless to you: you were so very good to me,"
she said, with that serious sweetness of her rare smile that I had used
to watch for, as an old dog watches for his young owner's--an old dog
that is used to be forgotten, but does not himself forget, though he is
old. "I must have seemed so thankless; but he bade me be silent, and I
have no law but him. After that night when we walked in Nero's fields,
and I went home and learned he loved me;--do you not see I forgot that
there was any one in all the world except himself and me? It must always
be so--at least, so I think. Oh, how true that poem was! Do you
remember how he read it that night after Mozart amongst the roses by the
fire? What use was endless life and all the lore of the spirits and
seers to Sospitra? I was like Sospitra, till he came; always thinking of
the stars and the heavens in the desert all alone, and always wishing
for life eternal, when it is only life _together_ that is worth a wish
or a prayer. But why do you look at me so? Perhaps you do not
understand. Perhaps I am selfish."

This was all that it seemed to her--that I