er. Knowledge reached him incredibly across the empty space, as
to what, over and above the pictured saints, she faced there in the
vault, lit so faintly by the shining of its golden walls. The service of
the benediction going on in the church below furnished him with the
figure of what came to him from her as she laid up her thoughts on an
altar before that mysterious intimation of maternity which presages in
right women the movement of passion. He felt himself caught up in it
purely above all sense of his personal insufficiency.

Back in his hotel after dinner he found he had still to let the roses
answer for him as he sat out on his balcony and realized oddly that
though he had no right to go to Miss Dassonville again until he had
thought out to its furthermost his relation to her, he could,
incontinently, think better in her company.

It was not wholly then with surprise, since he felt himself so much in
need of some compelling touch, that he heard, after an hour of futile
battling, the Princess speak to him.

She stood just beyond him in the shadow of the wistaria that went up all
the front of the balcony, and called him by his name.

"Ah," said Peter "I know now who you are. You are the one who stayed."

"How did you find out?"

"Because the one who ran away was the one he would have married."

He did not look at the Princess, but he saw the shadow of her that the
moon made, mixed with the lace of the wistaria leaves, tremble.

"Well," said she, "and what are you going to do about it?"

"You know then...?"

"I was there on the water with you this morning.... It was I that showed
you the way, but you had no eyes for anything."

It was the swift recurrent start of what he _had_ had eyes for that kept
Peter silent long enough for the Princess to have asked him again what
he was going to do about it, and then----

"The other night--with the music--she knew that I was there?"

"Oh--she!" He was taken all at once with the completeness with which in
his intimate attitude to things, Savilla did know. "She knows
everything."

"What was there so different about the other one?"

"Everything ... she was beautiful ... she was air and fire ... she made
the earth rock under me."

"And did you go to her calling?"

"I would have risen out of death and dust at her slightest word ... I
would have followed where her feet went over all the world."

"And why did you never?"

"I suppose," said Peter, "it was becau