"Do you remember that night in Venice?" she said again, almost below
her breath. And in the pause that followed the whispered words, the
most wonderful--the most wholly perfect--incident of her life occurred.
The voice that had power to chill or stir her, spoke her name; the
hands she had believed closed to her for ever were held out towards
her. Gore came slowly forward across the shadowed room.

"I do remember," he said. "I have never forgotten, I never shall
forget."

CHAPTER XIII

Nearly three weeks had passed since the night of Lady Diana Tuffnell's
dance; and Clodagh was once more occupying her London flat.

The season was long since dead; the fashionable world had betaken
itself to its customary haunts; London had, in the eyes of society,
become intolerable; and yet it seemed to her, as she woke each morning
and looked across the park, lying under a haze of heat, that she had
never known the great city until now; that she had never experienced
the exhilaration that can lie in its crowded, strenuous life until now,
when her own existence--her own soul seemed lifted above it on the
wings of happiness.

The hours, the days, the weeks that had followed the night of Lady
Diana's dance had been a chain of golden dreams, linked one to the
other. From the moment that Gore had made his confession, the face of
the world had altered for her. One overwhelming fact had coloured the
universe. The fact that he loved--that he needed her.

They had entered into no lucid explanations in the moments that had
followed the confession; for men and women in love have no need of such
mundane things. With the glorious egotism of nature, they are content
with the primitive consciousness that each lives and is close to the
other.

Clodagh had, it is true, made some faint and deprecating allusion to
the past--to Gore's first disapproval, and subsequent avoidance of her.
And he had paused in his flow of talk and looked at her with sudden
seriousness.

"I have never disapproved of you," he had said. "I have never felt it
was my place to disapprove."

"But you have avoided me?"

"Never intentionally. I have watched you; I have studied you, since we
have been here together."

"And what have you seen?"

Clodagh had remembered the card-room and Serracauld--the rose garden
and Deerehurst--with a quick, faint sense of fear.

But Gore had taken her hand and, with quiet courtesy, had raised it to
his lips.

"I have see