to be out of your arms, and our palace is fair. And oh! my beloved,
to-night I shall feast you as never before. The night of our full moon!
Paul, I have ordered a bower of roses and music and song. I want you to
remember it the whole of your life."

"As though I could forget a moment of our time, my sweet," said Paul. "It
needs no feasts or roses--only whatever delights you to do, delights me
too."

"Paul," she cooed after a while, during which her hand had lain in his and
there had been a soft silence, "is not this a life of joy, so smooth and
gliding, this way of Venice? It seems far from ruffles and storms. I shall
love it always, shall not you? and you must come back in other years and
study its buildings and its history, Paul--with your new, fine eyes."

"We shall come together, my darling," he answered. "I should never want
anything alone."

"Sweetheart!" she cooed again in his ears; and then presently, "Paul," she
said, "some day you must read 'Salammbo,' that masterpiece of Flaubert's.
There is a spirit of love in that which now you would understand--the love
which looked out of Matho's eyes when his body was beaten to jelly. It is
the love I have for you, my own--a love 'beyond all words or sense'--as one
of your English poets says. Do you know, with the strange irony of things,
when a woman's love for a man rises to the highest point there is in it
always an element of _the wife_? However wayward and tigerish and
undomestic she may be, she then desires to be the acknowledged possession
and belonging of the man, even to her own dishonour. She desires to
reproduce his likeness, she wants to compass his material good. She will
think of his food, and his raiment, and his well-being, and never of her