d.

"Yes," she said, and gave him the book. While he read, she drew in deep
breaths, gathering strength against an emergency, if an emergency were to
come. But she hoped it would not. She wanted, oh, so much! to keep him for
a comrade--for the comrade who had made this day the best day of her life.
She did not want to stop playing, because if it had come to earnest, deep
realities, as she was afraid it must come now, there would be no place for
Nick Hilliard in her future--the future of Paolo di Sereno's disillusioned
wife. "Still, here under these trees, I could tell him everything better
than I could tell it anywhere else, and make him understand, and even
forgive," she thought. "Without fear, I could let him know that I care for
him, and that he has been the only man, except father, who has meant
anything great to the _real_ me. Almost, I wish he would speak--if he
_does_ love me. And _I_ know he does."

But he lay reading the fancies she had written about the forest, and she
could not guess how he was summoning his courage, as a general, surprised,
summons his forces to battle. She did not know how deep was his humility
in thoughts of her, any more than she realized how utterly her first
point of view had changed toward him, the "forest creature," the
"interesting, picturesque figure." So entirely was he a man, and the one
man, that she had forgotten her old impersonal frame of mind.

He came to the last sentence in the book, broken short, where her pencil
had stopped of itself.

"Thank you," he said. "I'm glad you feel those things about the forest.
It's always been like that to me--sacred. If anything great and wonderful
were to happen, I'd rather have it happen here than anywhere else. Would
you?"

_Yes, it was coming!_ Suddenly she half wanted it to come--this crisis in
their lives; yet something made her push it away, just for a little while;
not to have the end quite so soon, no matter how beautiful an end.

"Oh, wait!" she exclaimed. "Don't let's talk of ourselves yet--not for a
few minutes. Wait with me, and neither of us will say one word till the
sun has set and the light has changed."

"Till the light has changed," Nick echoed, a shadow falling over his face.
He raised himself higher on his elbow, his shoulder still touching her
foot, and they looked toward the west.

The forest seemed to have been lit up for some great religious festival.
Each towering tree was a Titanic candle, with a flame at t