stion:

"Well, Princess Sofia?"

And then, amazingly, her tongue betrayed her, the phrases she had framed so
carefully vanished utterly from out her mind; and she heard herself saying
in rather tremulous accents:

"It's all right. I shan't tell."

"About my understanding Chinese?"

"Yes--about that."

"Then you do care--?"

She was panicky with knowledge that somehow her emotions had managed to
slip their moorings and get beyond her handling. It didn't help or mend
matters much to hear her own voice stammering:

"Yes, of course, I--I don't want you to--to have to go away--"

Oh, the vanity of trying to hoodwink him who knew so well what she was now
for the first time realizing!

"Because you like me a little, Princess Sofia?"

"Why--yes--of course I do--"

"Because you know I love you, dear."

And then she found herself clinging to Karslake; and his lips were warm
upon her hands ...

So suddenly and at long last it came to Sofia, that Love for which all her
days had been one long weariness of waiting, Love that brimmed with
raptures what had been only aching emptiness and made the desert places to
blossom as the rose. And the joy of it proved overmastering, sweeping her
off her feet and dazing her, leaving her breathless and thoughtless but for
the all-obscuring thought--at length she loved, and the one whom she loved
loved her!

And for a space she existed in an iridescent dream of happiness, without
sense of relation to a material world, forgetful of the flight of time,
lost to everything but her lover's arms and voice and lips.

It might have been five minutes, it might have been sixty, before she
became aware that Karslake was gently disengaging her hands. "Dearest,
dearest!" she heard him say. "We must be sensible. That was the front door,
I'm afraid."

The meaning in his insistence presently began to penetrate, if vaguely, and
she suffered him to go from her a pace or two. But, still a little blind
with the beauty of the revelation that had been granted unto her, nothing
that met her gaze seemed to be in true focus except her lover's face: even
the countenance of Victor swam into her ken as if blurred by veils of mist,
its dour, forbidding look had no significance to her intelligence. Victor
himself, for that matter, was a figure without real consequence other than
as a symbol of the old order, the tedious old ways of the world from which
she had magically escaped.

A ring of sarcastic apol