Don't you believe
that, Neale, that we would have come together somehow, anyhow?" she
asked, "even if you had gone straight back from Genoa to Ashley? Maybe
it might have been up there after you'd begun to run the mill. Maybe I'd
have gone back to America and gone up to visit Cousin Hetty again."

He was still silent.

She said urgently, as if in alarm, "Neale, you don't believe that we
could have passed all our lives and never have _seen_ each other?"

He turned on her his deep-set eyes, full of tenderness and humor and
uncertainty, and shook his head. "Yes, dear, I do believe that," he said
regretfully. "I don't see how I can help believing it. Why, I hadn't the
faintest idea of going back to settle in Ashley before I met you. I had
taken Uncle Burton's mill and his bequest of four thousand dollars as a
sort of joke. What could I do with them, without anything else? And what
on earth did I want to do with them? Nothing! As far as I had any plans
at all, it was to go home, see Father and Mother for a while, get
through the legal complications of inheritance, sell the mill and house
. . . I wouldn't have thought of such a thing as bothering even to go to
Ashley to look at them . . . and then take the money and go off somewhere,
somewhere different, and far away: to China maybe. I was pretty restless
in my mind, pretty sure that nothing in our civilization was worth the
candle, you know, before you arrived on the scene to put everything in
focus. And if I had done all that, while you were still here in Rome,
running up and down your scales, honestly . . . I know I sound awfully
literal . . . but I don't see how we ever could have met, do you, dear?"

He offered her this, with a look half of apology, half of simple
courage.

She considered it and him seriously, studying his face and eyes,
listening retrospectively to the accent of his words, and immensely
astonished him by suddenly flashing a kiss on his cheek. "You're
miraculous!" she said. "You don't know how it feels; as though I'd been
floundering in a marsh, deeper and deeper, and then all at once, when I
thought I'd come to know there wasn't anything in the world _but_ marsh,
to come out on beautiful, fine, clean earth, where I feel the very
strength of ages under my feet. You don't _know_ how good it seems to
have a silly, romantic remark like what I said, answered the way you
did, telling the truth; how _good_ it feels to be pulled down to what's
what, and to