were very commonplace.

"Oh, my love, my love!" he said. And she, listening to them with
sudden tears in her brown eyes, seemed to find in them the utmost
eloquence of the human tongue.

"It has been so long, so long!" he gasped. "I began to think I was
never to see you again."

They drifted side by side along a winding, rose-hedged path, past an
old sun-dial, past a triumphant peacock strutting before his mild
little mate, past a fountain whose spray flung out to them a welcome.
She led the way with the accustomed step of one who knew and loved the
place. They came to a marble seat, half hidden by a tangle of vines
and scarlet blossoms, and sheltered by overhanging oleander branches;
there she sat down and moved her skirts aside that he might sit close
to her. Her brown eyes, raised now to his hungry gray ones, looked at
him with the softened brilliance he had sometimes seen in those of a
happy child.

"Should you have missed me," she asked, softly, "if you had never seen
me again? Should you have been sorry?"

He drew a long breath.

"I love you," he said. "Whatever you are, wherever you come from,
whatever all this means, I love you. I don't understand anything else,
but I know that. It's the one sure thing, the one real thing, in all
this tangle."