it so.

"What would you?" she asked in the odd foreign fashion that clung to
her still, and showed itself when she was taken unawares.

"They say I need nothing;" and the blue eyes laugh down into hers.
"They say I need nothing now that I have been crowned by a King with
laurel-leaves." But even as he speaks the smile fades from his lips:
he sees no answering flash on hers.

"That is what you said in the Vatican that night," she says. "Is it
true?"

He begins to fear that she is losing her mind, but he speaks gently to
her: "Have we met before, then?"

Hyacinthe, standing between two dusty flies while the mirth of the
farce rings out from the stage, tells her dream, for the third time,
to-night to him. "Is it true that you need nothing?" she asks again,
raising anxious eyes to his.

For a moment the man wavers. Last night he would have laughed to scorn
the idea of _his_ not being ready with a pretty speech for a beautiful
actress: just now he is puzzled for a reply, and he knows full well
that some strange new jarring hand is sweeping the strings of his
life. "It is true," he sighs, remembering a true heart that loves
him. "I have wealth, position--these things first, for they breed the
rest," he says with a small sneer--"troops of friends and the promised
hand of a woman whom I have asked to marry me."

"I am sorry," she says at last with a child's sad, unconscious
inflection, "but all the same, I have found you. Cupid said I should."

He surveys her calculatingly: he is a very keen man of the world, and
he has recovered sufficiently from the peculiarity of the situation to
speculate upon it with true British acumen. Shall he, or shall he not,
put a certain question to her, or leave the matter at rest for ever?
Being a person well used to gratifying himself, he asks his question:
"Supposing that it had not been true, what would you have had to say
to me then?" And, strange to say, his face flushes as he finishes--not
hers.

"Nothing." The word comes coldly forth without a fellow. He knows then
that she has only looked at Love, and that the thoughtless harmony of
his life is done for him.

"May I see you sometimes?" he cries as she makes a step onward.

"When you will," she replies, going farther along the narrow passage,
and then looking back at him clearly. "I have found you: I am very
content. And if you thought I loved you--Well, Love, you know, was a
blind god, and so must ever be content to look at