seemed infinitely detached--the
insignificant problems of a former existence, long solved, prehistoric,
without interest. Then he spoke. He remembered well what he had said. It
was that to-morrow they twain, drawing apart from all the evil tongues
of the world, were to begin the old walk along the Sure Way of
Happiness. The world was not for them. A better life was to be theirs.
They would wander through noble and high-set cities. Italy, beloved of
lovers, waited for them. Her stone-pines beckoned to them. There he
would tell her about great histories, and of the lives of the knights
and ladies who dwelt in the cities set on the hills.

"I am so ignorant," Miriam Gale had said, pushing his head back that she
might look at his whole face at once. "I am almost afraid of you--but I
love you, and I shall learn all these things."

It was all inconceivable and strange. The glamour of love mingled with
the soft, fitful firelight reflected in Miriam's eyes, till they twain
seemed the only realities. So that when she began to speak of her
husband, it seemed at first no more to John Arniston than if she had
told him that her shoeblack was yet alive. He and she had no past; only
a future, instant and immediate, waiting for them to-morrow.

How many times did they not move apart after a last farewell? John
Arniston could not tell, though to content himself he tried to count.
Then, their eyes drawing them together again, they had stood silent in
the long pause when the life throbs to and fro and the heart thunders in
the ears. At last, with "To-morrow!" for an iterated watchword between
them, they parted, and John Arniston found himself in the street. It was
the full rush of the traffic of London; but to him it was all strangely
silent. Everything ran noiselessly to-night. Newsboys mouthed the latest
horror, and John Arniston never heard them. Mechanically he avoided the
passers-by, but it was with no belief in their reality. To him they
were but phantom shapes walking in a dream. His world was behind
him--and before. The fragrance of the bliss of dreams was on his lips.
His heart bounded with the thought of that "To-morrow" which they had
promised to one another. The white Italian cities which he had visited
alone gleamed whiter than ever before him. Was it possible that he
should sit in the great square of St. Mark's with Miriam Gale by his
side, the sun making a patchwork of gold and blue among the pinnacles of
the Church of th