known you all my
life, even before this life began, in some other existence of which you
remain the only memory: you, your eyes, your smile."

Her heart bounded as sometimes the heart bounds at night, in that
mysterious break between waking and sleeping, which is like a leap, and
a fall over an abyss without bottom.

She wished to hold his words in her mind and dwell upon them, as if upon
a suddenly opened page of some marvellous illuminated missal of
priceless value. Conscious of no answer to give, or need of answer for
the moment, her subconscious self nevertheless began at once to speak,
and the rest of her listened, startled at first, then with wonder
acknowledging the truth of her own admission.

"Why, yes," the undertone in herself answered Vanno. "It was like that
with me, too, at Marseilles and afterward--as if I had known you always,
as if our souls had been in the same place together before they had
bodies. When you looked at me first, I felt you were like what a picture
of Romeo ought to be, though I never saw a picture of Romeo, that I can
remember. How strange you should have had Juliet in your mind! Yet
perhaps not strange, for each may have sent a thought into the brain of
the other--if such things can be."

"Such things are," Vanno answered, with passion. "In the desert where
I've lived for months together, alone except for one friend, a man of
the East, or an Arab servant, a voice used to say when I waked suddenly
at night sometimes, that there was a woman waiting for me, whose soul
and mine were not strangers, and that I should recognize her when we
met."

"It is like a dream!" Mary broke in upon him, when he paused as if
following a thought down some path in his mind. "As if we were dreaming
now--to the music down there. Maybe we _are_ dreaming. What does it all
mean?"

"It means that when the world was made we were made for each other. But
what has happened to us since? How have we so drifted apart? I think I
have been faithful to you in my heart always. But you? You've wandered
a million miles away from me. Nothing told you to wait. You have not
waited, or you would not live your life as you seem to be living
it--among such men and such women. For God's sake, even if you don't
care for me as things are now between us, let me take you away from all
this, let me put you where you will be safe, where you can be what you
were meant to be."

"I--I don't understand," Mary said, her breath coming