f evening light.

"Is not this still and far away?" he said, as they sat on an old stone
bench. "I often stay the whole morning here when I spend a week at
Versailles."

"How peaceful and beautiful! Oh, I would like a week here, too!" and
Theodora sighed.

"You must not sigh, beautiful princess," he implored, "on this our happy
day."

The slender lines of her figure seemed all drooping. She reminded him
more than ever of the fragment of Psyche in the Naples Museum.

"No, I must not sigh," she said. "But it seems suddenly to have grown
sad--the air--what does it mean? Tell me, you who know so many things?"
There was a pathos in her voice like a child in distress.

It communicated itself to him, it touched some chords in his nature
hitherto silent. His whole being rushed out to her in tenderness.

"It seems to me it is because the time grows nearer when we must go back
to the world. First to dinner with the others, and then--Paris. I would
like to stay thus always--just alone with you."

She did not refute this solution of her sadness. She knew it was true.
And when he looked into her eyes, the blue was troubled with a mist as
of coming tears.

Then passion--more mighty than ever--seized him once more. He only felt
a wild desire to comfort her, to kiss away the mist--to talk to her. Ah!

"Theodora!" he said, and his voice vibrated with emotion, while he bent
forward and seized both her hands, which he lifted to his face--she had
not put on her gloves again after the tea--her cool, little, tender
hands! He kissed and kissed their palms.

"Darling--darling," he said, incoherently, "what have I done to make
your dear eyes wet? Oh, I love you so, I love you so, and I have only
made you sad."

She gave a little, inarticulate cry. If a wounded dove could sob, it
might have been the noise of a dove, so beseeching and so pathetic. "Oh,
please--you must not," she said. "Oh, what have you done!--you have
killed our happy day."

And this was the beginning of his awakening. He sat for many moments
with his head buried in his hands. What, indeed, had he done!--and they
would be turned out of their garden of Eden--and all because he was a
brute, who could not control his passion, but must let it run riot on
the first opportunity.

He suffered intensely. Suffered, perhaps, for the first time in his
life.

She had not said one word of anger--only that tone in her voice reached
to his heart.

He did not move and did