y would continue to drift, he shutting his
eyes to the penalty awaiting his self-indulgence, the taxes of pain
rolling up for the hour when her necessary departure would involve the
uprooting of every last little flower in that wretched garden of his
heart. With such a mental pattern of the future he had gone to bed at
the end of the first day.

On the next morning something perhaps in deep dreams which he did not
remember, or in the happy manner of the new day lighting a scarlet
geranium on the terrace ledge, or simply perhaps the whisper of an
angel, had effected a change. A heart-throb, a stroke of magic, had so
lifted him up that over the top of the wall edging the road of life for
him he had seen a thrilling garden outstretched, smiling in the sun, a
sight that so enkindled him with the witchery of its promises that he
felt he should seek for a way into that garden till he found it; should,
if necessary, demolish the wall.

That day he went walking on the hills beyond Settignano, and the new
light, the intoxication, persisted--the vision of himself as Aurora's
lover. Why not? An escape from the past, a different adventure from all
prefigured in his dull expectations before.... In his theory of living
Gerald had always admitted the gallant advisability of burning ships.
There was room in his theory of living for just such a divergence from
design as he now meditated. When the call comes, summon it to never so
improbable places, the poet and artist obeys. He had gone to bed on the
second night with these thoughts and a plan for the morrow.

Now that morrow was wearing to an end and all the floating splendid
courageous thoughts and feelings, brave in the assurance, along with the
determination, of victory, must be somehow caught and compressed and
turned into the language--how poverty-stricken, how stale!--of a
proposal of marriage; even as a great variegated, gold-shot,
butterfly-tinted, cloud-light tissue of the Orient is drawn into a
colorless whipcord twist that it may pass through a little ring.

As he revolved in his mind what he should say to start with, Gerald saw
appropriateness for the first time in the methods of the historic Gaul,
who seized by her hair the charming creature whom he felt allied to him
by deep things, seated her on the horse before him, and rode away. But
what he would have liked so much the best would have been to lay his
head in Aurora's willing lap, embrace her knees tenderly, and hav