oice that quailed a little, as if in terror of its own
audacity. John, with tingling pulses, turned upon her. But she,
according to her habit at such times, refused him her eyes. He could
see, though, that her eyelashes trembled.

"Oh," he cried, "I love her so much, I need her so, I suppose I shall
end by doing the dishonourable thing."

"Did you ever tell her that you were Lord Blanchemain's heir?" she
asked.

"I never thought of it. Why should I?" said John.

"When you were bemoaning your poverty, as an obstacle to marriage, you
might have remembered that your birth counted for something. With us
Austrians, for example, birth counts for almost everything,--for
infinitely more than money."

"I think," said John, as one impersonally generalizing, "that a
fortune-hunter with a tuft is the least admirable variety of that
animal. I wish you could see what beautiful little rose-white ears she
has, and the lovely way in which her dark hair droops about them."

"How long ago was it," mused she, "that love first made people fancy
they saw beauties which had no real existence?"

"Oh, the moment you see a thing, it acquires real existence," John
returned. "The act of seeing is an act of creation. The thing you see
has real existence on your retina and in your mind, if nowhere else, and
that is the realest sort of real existence."

"Then she must thank you as the creator of her 'rose-white' ears,"
laughed Maria Dolores. "I wonder whether that sunset has any real
existence, and whether it is really as splendid as it seems."

The west had become a vast sea of gold, a pure and placid sea of
many-tinted gold, bounded and intersected and broken into innumerable
wide bays and narrow inlets by great cloud-promontories, purple and rose
and umber. Directly opposite, just above the crest-line of the hills,
hung the nearly full moon, pale as a mere phantom of itself.
And from somewhere in the boscage at the garden's end came a
lool-lool-lool-lioo-lio, deep and long-drawn, liquid and complaining,
which one knew to be the preliminary piping-up of Philomel.

"If some things," said John, "derive their beauty from the eye of the
beholder, the beauty of other things is determined by the presence or
absence of the person you long to share all beautiful visions with. The
sky, the clouds, the whole air and earth, this evening, seem to me
beauty in its ultimate perfection."

Maria Dolores softly laughed, softly, softly. And for a long t