reverie, smiling to themselves.

"How the fountains shone in the sun, that day," she murmured; "the spray they cast on us was all tiny opals and diamonds."

"You're sure you aren't going to be sorry to go back to America to live, to leave all that?" asked the man. "I get anxious about that sometimes. It seems an awful jump to go away from such beautiful historic things, back to a narrow little mountain town."

"I'd like to know what right you have to call it narrow, when you've never even seen it," she returned.

"Well, anybody could make a pretty fair guess that a small Vermont town isn't going to be so very wide," he advanced reasonably.

"It may not be wide, but it's deep," she replied.

He laughed at her certainty. "You were about eleven years old when you saw it last, weren't you?"

"No, you've got it wrong. It was when we came to France to live that I was eleven, and of course I stopped going to Ashley regularly for vacations then. But I went back for several summers in the old house with Cousin Hetty, when I was in America for college, after Mother died."

"Oh well, I don't care what it's like," he said, "except that it's the place where I'm going to live with you. Any place on earth would seem wide enough and deep enough, if I had you there."

"Isn't it funny," she mused, "that I should know so much more about it than you? To think how I played all around your uncle's mill and house, lots of times when I was a little girl, and never dreamed . . ."

"No funnier than all the rest of it," he demurred. "Once you grant our existing and happening to meet out of all the millions of people in the world, you can't think up anything funnier. Just the little two-for-a-cent queerness of our happening to meet in Rome instead of in Brooklyn, and your happening to know the town where my uncle lived and owned the mill he left me . . . that can't hold a candle for queerness, for wonderfulness, compared to my having ever laid eyes on you. Suppose I'd never come to Rome at all? When I got the news of Uncle Burton's death and the bequest, I was almost planning to sail from Genoa and not come to southern Italy at all."

She shook her head confidently. "You can't scare me with any such hideous possibilities. It's not possible that we shouldn't ever have met, both of us being in the world. Didn't you ever study chemistry? Didn't they teach you there are certain elements that just will come together, no matter how you mix them up with other things?"

He made no answer, gazing out across the plain far below them, mellowing richly in the ever-softening light of the sunset.

She looked doubtfully at his profile, rather lean, with the beginning already drawn of the deep American line from the Corner of the nose to the mouth, that is partly humorous and partly grim. "Don't you believe that, Neale, that we would have come together somehow, anyhow?" she asked, "even if you had gone straight back from Genoa to Ashley? Maybe it might have been up there after you'd begun to run the mill. Maybe I'd have gone back to America and gone up to visit Cousin Hetty again."

He was still silent.

She said urgently, as if in alarm, "Neale, you don't believe that we could have passed all our lives and never have seen each other?"

He turned on her his deep-set eyes, full of tenderness and humor and uncertainty, and shook his head. "Yes, dear, I do believe that," he said regretfully. "I don't see how I can help believing it. Why, I hadn't the faintest idea of going back to settle in Ashley before I met you. I had taken Uncle Burton's mill and his bequest of four thousand dollars as a sort of joke. What could I do with them, without anything else? And what on earth did I want to do with them? Nothing! As far as I had any plans at all, it was to go home, see Father and Mother for a while, get through the legal complications of inheritance, sell the mill and house . . . I wouldn't have thought of such a thing as bothering even to go to Ashley to look at them . . . and then take the money and go off somewhere, somewhere different, and far away: to China maybe. I was pretty restless in my mind, pretty sure that nothing in our civilization was worth the candle, you know, before you arrived on the scene to put everything in focus. And if I had done all that, while you were still here in Rome, running up and down your scales, honestly . . . I know I sound awfully literal . . . but I don't see how we ever could have met, do you, dear?"

He offered her this, with a look half of apology, half of simple courage.

She considered it and him seriously, studying his face and eyes, listening retrospectively to the accent of his words, and immensely astonished him by suddenly flashing a kiss on his cheek. "You're miraculous!" she said. "You don't know how it feels; as though I'd been floundering in a marsh, deeper and deeper, and then all at once, when I thought I'd come to know there wasn't anything in the world but marsh, to come out on beautiful, fine, clean earth, where I feel the very strength of ages under my feet. You don't know how good it seems to have a silly, romantic remark like what I said, answered the way you did, telling the truth; how good it feels to be pulled down to what's what, and to know you can do it and really love me too."

He had been so startled and moved by her kiss that he had heard her words but vaguely. "I don't seem to catch hold of all that. What's it all about?"

"It's all about the fact that I really begin to believe that you will be loyal and tell me the truth," she told him.

He saw cause for gravity in this, remembering the great moment so shortly back of them, and said with a surprised and hurt accent, "Didn't you believe me, when I said I would?"

She took up his hand in hers and said rapidly, "Dear Neale, I did believe it, for just a moment, and I can't believe anything good of anybody for longer than that, not really in my heart of hearts. And it's my turn to tell you some truth when I tell you about that unbelief, what I've hardly even ever told myself, right out in words."

He was listening now, fixing on her a look of profound, intelligent attention, as she went on, stumbling, reaching out for words, discarding those she found, only her steady gaze giving coherence to her statement. "You know, living the way I have . . . I've told you . . . I've seen a great deal more than most girls have. And then, half brought up in France with people who are clever and have their eyes wide open, people who really count, I've seen how they don't believe in humans, or goodness, or anything that's not base. They know life is mostly bad and cruel and dull and low, and above all that it's bound to fool you if you trust to it, or get off your guard a single minute. They don't teach you that, you know; but you see it's what they believe and what they spend all their energies trying to dodge a little, all they think they can. Then everything you read, except the silly little Bibliothèque-Rose sort of thing, makes you know that it's true . . . Anatole France, and Maupassant, and Schnitzler. Of course back in America you find lots of nice people who don't believe that. But they're so sweet you know they'd swallow anything that made things look pleasant. So you don't dare take their word for anything. They won't even look at what's bad in everybody's life, they just pretend it's not there, not in their husbands, or wives or children, and so you know they're fooled." She lowered her voice, which faltered a little, but she still continued to look straight into his eyes, "And as for love, why, I've just hated the sound of the name and . . . I'm horribly afraid of it, even now."

He asked her gravely, "Don't you love me? Don't you think that I love you?"

She looked at him piteously, wincing, bracing herself with an effort to be brave. "I must try to be as honest as I want you to be. Yes, I love you, Neale, with all my heart a thousand times more than I ever dreamed