cket from her
neck. "Don't you recognize your own handwriting, or were you not
certain, just then, that you really did love me?"

Dear, dear! How often would she repeat that wondrous phrase! Together
they bent over the tiny slips of paper. There it was again--"I love
you"--twice blazoned in magic symbols. With blushing eagerness she told
him how, by mere accident of course, she caught sight of her own name.
It was not very wrong, was it, to pick up that tiny scrap, or those
others, which she could not help seeing, and which unfolded their
simple tale so truthfully? Wrong! It was so delightfully right that he
must kiss her again to emphasize his convictions.

All this fondling and love-making had, of course, an air of grotesque
absurdity because indulged in by two grimy and tattered individuals
crouching beneath a tarpaulin on a rocky ledge, and surrounded by
bloodthirsty savages intent on their destruction. Such incidents
require the setting of convention, the conservatory, with its wealth of
flowers and plants, a summer wood, a Chippendale drawing-room. And yet,
God wot, men and women have loved each other in this grey old world
without stopping to consider the appropriateness of place and season.

After a delicious pause Iris began again----

"Robert--I must call you Robert now--there, there, please let me get a
word in even edgeways--well then, Robert dear, I do not care much what
happens now. I suppose it was very wicked and foolish of me to speak as
I did before--before you called me Iris. Now tell me at once. Why did
you call me Iris?"

"You must propound that riddle to your godfather."

"No wriggling, please. Why did you do it?"

"Because I could not help myself. It slid out unawares."

"How long have you thought of me only as Iris, your Iris?"

"Ever since I first understood that somewhere in the wide world was a
dear woman to love me and be loved."

"But at one time you thought her name was Elizabeth?"

"A delusion, a mirage! That is why those who christened you had the
wisdom of the gods."

Another interlude. They grew calmer, more sedate. It was so undeniably
true they loved one another that the fact was becoming venerable with
age. Iris was perhaps the first to recognize its quiet certainty.

"As I cannot get you to talk reasonably," she protested, "I must appeal
to your sympathy. I am hungry, and oh, so thirsty."

The girl had hardly eaten a morsel for her midday meal. Then she was
desponde