r was his provision of its power
to forget the dark and remember sunshine. The year and a half of her
life with Fiorsen, the empty months that followed it were gone, dispersed
like mist by the radiance of the last three years in whose sky had hung
just one cloud, no bigger than a hand, of doubt whether Summerhay really
loved her as much as she loved him, whether from her company he got as
much as the all she got from his. She would not have been her
distrustful self if she could have settled down in complacent security;
and her mind was ever at stretch on that point, comparing past days and
nights with the days and nights of the present. Her prevision that, when
she loved, it would be desperately, had been fulfilled. He had become
her life. When this befalls one whose besetting strength and weakness
alike is pride--no wonder that she doubts.

For their Odyssey they had gone to Spain--that brown un-European land of
"lyrio" flowers, and cries of "Agua!" in the streets, where the men seem
cleft to the waist when they are astride of horses, under their wide
black hats, and the black-clothed women with wonderful eyes still look as
if they missed their Eastern veils. It had been a month of gaiety and
glamour, last days of September and early days of October, a revel of
enchanted wanderings in the streets of Seville, of embraces and laughter,
of strange scents and stranger sounds, of orange light and velvety
shadows, and all the warmth and deep gravity of Spain. The Alcazar, the
cigarette-girls, the Gipsy dancers of Triana, the old brown ruins to
which they rode, the streets, and the square with its grave talkers
sitting on benches in the sun, the water-sellers and the melons; the
mules, and the dark ragged man out of a dream, picking up the ends of
cigarettes, the wine of Malaga, burnt fire and honey! Seville had
bewitched them--they got no further. They had come back across the brown
uplands of Castile to Madrid and Goya and Velasquez, till it was time for
Paris, before the law-term began. There, in a queer little French
hotel--all bedrooms, and a lift, coffee and carved beds, wood fires, and
a chambermaid who seemed all France, and down below a restaurant, to
which such as knew about eating came, with waiters who looked like monks,
both fat and lean--they had spent a week. Three special memories of that
week started up in the moonlight before Gyp's eyes: The long drive in
the Bois among the falling leaves of trees f