"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.