attached to your dear father. Command all my service. I will come again
in the course of the day."

With many sympathetic smiles and half-comic inclinations of his short,
broad body, the little man bowed himself out.

CHAPTER XXVI

Unorna drew one deep breath when she first heard her name fall with a
loving accent from the Wanderer's lips. Surely the bitterness of despair
was past since she was loved and not called Beatrice. The sigh that came
then was of relief already felt, the forerunner, as she fancied, too,
of a happiness no longer dimmed by shadows of fear and mists of rising
remorse. Gazing into his eyes, she seemed to be watching in their
reflection a magic change. She had been Beatrice to him, Unorna to
herself, but now the transformation was at hand--now it was to come. For
him she loved, and who loved her, she was Unorna even to the name, in
her own thoughts she had taken the dark woman's face. She had risked all
upon the chances of one throw and she had won. So long as he had called
her by another's name the bitterness had been as gall mingled in the
wine of love. But now that too was gone. She felt that it was complete
at last. Her golden head sank peacefully upon his shoulder in the
morning light.

"You have been long in coming, love," she said, only half consciously,
"but you have come as I dreamed--it is perfect now. There is nothing
wanting any more."

"It is all full, all real, all perfect," he answered, softly.

"And there is to be no more parting, now----"

"Neither here, nor afterwards, beloved."

"Then this is afterwards. Heaven has nothing more to give. What is
Heaven? The meeting of those who love--as we have met. I have forgotten
what it was to live before you came----"

"For me, there is nothing to remember between that day and this."

"That day when you fell ill," Unorna said, "the loneliness, the fear for
you----"

Unorna scarcely knew that it had not been she who had parted from him so
long ago. Yet she was playing a part, and in the semi-consciousness of
her deep self-illusion it all seemed as real as a vision in a dream so
often dreamed that it has become part of the dreamer's life. Those
who fall by slow degrees under the power of the all-destroying opium
remember yesterday as being very far, very long past, and recall faint
memories of last year as though a century had lived and perished since
then, seeing confusedly in their own lives the lives of others, and
other ex