with a
laugh that rose, through the moonbeams, from a marble kiosk enveloped
in flowers. And as the breeze, heavy with the fragrance of many
blossoms, caressed her face, Lilla felt that the gardens must be full
of hidden persons each of whom had at last found the amorous complement.

At the end of the esplanade, in the light of the French windows,
Cornelius Rysbroek's face appeared, then drifted away.

"What is that fellow's name?" asked Lawrence Teck. "Just now he wanted
me to take him along to Africa. He seemed quite unhappy, especially
when I had to tell him no. Indeed, he gave me a rather curious
impression of misery and recklessness. What is it? An unfortunate
love affair?"

"So it's that," she vouchsafed, staring at him intently, "which starts
men off to the wilds?"

"Sometimes it's that which brings them back from the wilds. I could
give you an instance----"

They, too, were now descending the steps between the pools.

The leafy alleys, silvered by the moon, and redolent of flowers that
had been made magical by the alchemy of night, surrounded them. They
came to a spot where a circular wall of foliage, rising behind stone
benches, hemmed in a fountain, above which a marble antique warrior was
lifting in his arms a marble girl, who struggled against that seizure
with a convulsive energy, while her upturned face wore a look of
happiness. Lawrence Teck made the comment:

"It appears that a rather primitive Greek gentleman has found a nymph
bathing in a pool. If I remember, mortals who tried to capture nymphs
were liable to die."

"Yes," she assented, staring at the upturned face of the captive. "He
should not have tried."

"But no doubt it's hard for them to be reasonable at such times,
especially when the person that they try to catch seems so strange, yet
so overwhelmingly congenial--the embodied dream."

"Then she should have prevented him."

"Perhaps she tried to, with the usual success when it's a question of
love in opposition to fear."

Lilla turned aside, drawing a cloud of golden tulle around her slender
shoulders. "Does that acuteness also come to one in the jungle?" She
seated herself upon the nearest stone bench. "What is that story of
yours?"

"A story of one of those sentimental exiles and the picture of his
ideal."

The man, he said, had found the picture in a tattered magazine in the
Afrika Hotel at Zanzibar. Of all the thousands of fair faces that he
had seen depi