together," she asked him, "into that marvellous
country; shall we see it together, as if with the self-same eyes, and
tell each other in the same words all that we think and feel?"

"So," he replied, "have I hoped and dreamed."

"What?" she asked, with rising joy. "Then you, too, have looked for me?"

"All my life."

"How wonderful! And did you never, never find anyone in the other world
who understood you?"

"Not wholly--not as you and I understand each other."

"Then you feel it, too? Oh, I am happy," she sighed.

They stood, hand in hand, looking down over the parapet upon the
shimmering landscape which stretched forth beneath them into sapphirine
space, and the Spirit of Life, who kept watch near the threshold, heard
now and then a floating fragment of their talk blown backward like the
stray swallows which the wind sometimes separates from their migratory
tribe.

"Did you never feel at sunset--"

"Ah, yes; but I never heard anyone else say so. Did you?"

"Do you remember that line in the third canto of the 'Inferno?'"

"Ah, that line--my favorite always. Is it possible--"

"You know the stooping Victory in the frieze of the Nike Apteros?"

"You mean the one who is tying her sandal? Then you have noticed, too,
that all Botticelli and Mantegna are dormant in those flying folds of
her drapery?"

"After a storm in autumn have you never seen--"

"Yes, it is curious how certain flowers suggest certain painters--the
perfume of the incarnation, Leonardo; that of the rose, Titian; the
tuberose, Crivelli--"

"I never supposed that anyone else had noticed it."

"Have you never thought--"

"Oh, yes, often and often; but I never dreamed that anyone else had."

"But surely you must have felt--"

"Oh, yes, yes; and you, too--"

"How beautiful! How strange--"

Their voices rose and fell, like the murmur of two fountains answering
each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain
tender impatience, he turned to her and said: "Love, why should we
linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into that
beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue
hill above the shining river."

As he spoke, the hand she had forgotten in his was suddenly withdrawn,
and he felt that a cloud was passing over the radiance of her soul.

"A home," she repeated, slowly, "a home for you and me to live in for
all eternity?"

"Why not, love? Am I not the soul that yours ha