speak. Probably as she rested her head on my arm and looked into my
eyes, each read the other's character more truly and clearly than
words the most frank and open could ever enable us to do. I had taught
her last night a few substitutes in the softest tongue I knew for
those words of natural tenderness in which her language is signally
deficient: taught her to understand them, certainly not to use them,
for it was long before I could even induce her to address me by name.

"My father bade me yesterday," she said at last, "ask you in future to
wear the dress of our people. Not that you will be the less an object
of attention and wonder, but that in retaining a distinction which
depends entirely on your own choice, you will seem intentionally to
prefer your own habits to ours."

"I comply of course," I observed. "Naturally the dress of every
country is best suited to its own conditions. Yet I should have
thought that a preference for my own world, even were it wholly
irrational, might seem at least natural and pardonable."

"People don't," she answered simply, "like any sign of individual
fancy or opinion. They don't like any one to show that he thinks them
wrong even on a matter of taste."

"I fear, then, _carissima_, that I must be content with unpopularity.
I may wear the costume of your people; but their thought, their
conduct, their inner and outer life, as your father reports them, and
as thus far I have seen them, are to me so unnatural, that the more I
resemble them externally the more my unlikeness in all else is likely
to attract notice. I am sorry for this, because women are by nature
prone to judge even their nearest and dearest by the standard of
fashion, and to exact from men almost as close a conformity to that
standard as they themselves display. I fear you will have to forgive
many heresies in my conduct as well as in my thoughts."

"You cannot suppose," she answered earnestly--she seemed incapable of
apprehending irony or jest,--"that I should wish you more like others
than you are. Whatever may happen hereafter, I shall always feel
myself the happiest of women in having belonged to one who cares for
something beside himself, and holds even life cheaper than love."
"I hope so, _carissima_. But in that matter there was scarcely more of
love than of choice. What I did for you I must have done no less for
Zevle [her sister]. If I had feared death as much as the Regent does,
I could not have returned