of fitness, and on this warm afternoon the
drawing-room was in soft-colored twilight, the Persian blinds being
clasped, and their lower panels pushed out a very little so as to let in
a modicum of the whiteness of day.

Gerald stood, very collected, if a trifle pale, holding, like a proper
votary, a bouquet--starry handful of sweet white hedge-roses,--which he
offered as soon as Aurora entered, saying he had picked them for her
that morning in the country near Castel di Poggio.

The meeting, in Aurora's jubilant sense of it, went off beautifully. She
said in a pleasant, easy tone and her company English,

"So you've got back. It's awfully nice to see you again. How well you
are looking. I was sure a change would do you good."

And Gerald said yes, he had found the sea air tonic. He had been staying
with the Johns, Vincent's mother lived in Leghorn. He had worked a
little, made a few drawings. Digressing, he mentioned a trifling gift he
had brought her, and produced a small brass vessel, fitted with two
hinged lids, meant to contain grains of incense for the altar. He said
he had found it in an antiquarian's shop and thought she might care for
it to drop her rings into; he supposed she took them off at night. Its
shape seemed to him to possess more than common elegance.

Aurora called it adorable, and his giving it to her sweet. They talked
as if they had been making believe, for the benefit of an audience, to
be the most ordinary friends.

And each of them meanwhile, with heart and head gone slightly insane in
secret, was considering a marvel. The long separation--it had been long
to them--had recreated for both something of the capacity to receive a
fresh impression of the other. The marvel to Aurora was that this choice
being, with his intellectual brow (that was her adjective for Gerald's
brow) his difference from others, all in the way of superiority to them,
the indescribable fascination residing in his every feature, mood, or
word, should be walking the world unclaimed and unattached, for her to
take if she were so minded. Her to take! It was vertiginous.

And the marvel to him was, in beholding that bounteous temple of a soul,
with its radiance of life, its share, so rich, of the mysterious
something which made the earliest men care to build homes; its gifts, so
large, of comfort and warmth--the marvel was that he should have dared
aspire to conquer it, should have set that to himself as a thing he was
go