thick bushes near them a nightingale began to sing. To Varick's
excited fancy there was a heart-breaking pathos in the soft notes.
They seemed to have been together, he and she, for a long time--for
hours. He bent his head till it touched hers.

"But you love me?" he asked. She moved a little and wiped her eyes
with an absurdly tiny, lace-edged square of linen. One corner, he
noticed, bore an embroidered coronet.

"Yes," she said, very quietly, "I love you."

Her tone as she spoke expressed such entire hopelessness that the full
sense of her words did not at once come to him. When it did, slowly,
sweetly, she was speaking again.

"But oh, dearest, dearest!" she broke out, "why do we love? To what
can love lead us--two poor shadows in a dream world, in which alone we
can meet?"

He was silent. There seemed, somehow, nothing that he could say,
though later he thought of many words with which he might have filled
that throbbing silence. The dusk deepened around them. Off in the
thicket the nightingale still warbled passionately, and now the stars
began to come out over their heads, pale as yet against the warm blue
of the heavens. Varick, sitting stiffly on the old marble bench,
became conscious of an odd dizziness, and set his teeth with a sudden
determination to show no evidence of it. She had risen and was moving
about among the rose-bushes just behind them. Almost before he missed
her she had returned, holding in her hand a beautiful salmon-hued
rose, with a flame-colored, crumply heart. He had never before seen