He looked at me in surprise.

"Why, because I had made up my mind to marry you!" he said. "You told me that this old place was a sort of dreamland of yours--and I didn't want to complicate matters. I wanted your love for me to be a reality."

"Well, it--it is!" I confessed.

After a long while--that is, the sun-dial said it was a long while--spent this way a sudden thought of my waiting hosts at Bannerley came over me. I sprang up from the step of the pedestal where we had been sitting.

"I _must_ get some word to Mrs. Montgomery!" I said. "They will be thinking that my rash American ways have got me into some dreadful sc.r.a.pe, I'm afraid."

But the serene man at my side was still serene. His face looked as if nothing on earth could ever cause him a pang again. He caught my hand and drew me gently, but rather steadfastly back to my place.

"Mrs. Montgomery knows everything--except that we are going to be married--when did you say, to-morrow?" he smiled. "I've been staying with them, and they told me about you, and I told them about you--and we had rather a satisfactory adjustment of neighborly relations."

I looked at him in awe. I could not quite shake off the idea that he had a miraculous lamp hidden about somewhere in his pockets. Things seemed to _happen_ when he wished them to happen.

"Did you chance to know that I would take a bad train and be delayed here this morning at sunrise?" I asked, trying to look dignified and unawed. "Did you know that I should be compelled to waste precious morning hours pacing up and down a railway station platform?"

"Why, of course," he answered imperturbably. "Mrs. Montgomery sent me over to meet you."

I sprang up again, more energetically this time.

"Then why didn't you meet me?" I asked, with the horror of shocking English propriety overwhelming me. "Come! We must go to Bannerley at once."

He rose and followed me toward the main garden path. Then he pointed the way to the house door.

"I've had Collins telephone that your train was very, very late," he explained. "She'll not be surprised--nor too inquisitive. She even suggested this morning that if you shouldn't get in until evening--the drive to Bannerley is very fine by moonlight."

In the late afternoon the chilly dusk sent little forerunners ahead, which caused the old wing of the house to be lighted from within, instead of opened to the cool dying sunset. A cheery fire was kindled in the room which had once been the library of Lady Frances Webb.

The dampness and air of disuse disappeared, and it seemed as if personalities came forth from the shadowy corners and sat beside the fire with Maitland Tait and me.

"This was her own desk, they tell me," he said, as he was showing the ancient treasures to me, yet still looking at them himself with half-awed, almost unbelieving eyes. "This was where all her famous books were written."

I crossed the room to where the little locked secretary stood. Its polished surface was sending back the firelight's glow and seemed to proclaim that its own mahogany was imprisoned sunshine.

"And she wrote those letters here," I said in a hushed voice. "Do you suppose she has some of his letters locked away somewhere?"

He nodded, fitting the key to its lock very carefully.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He drew me to a corner of the room]

"All of them! All the letters written her by--Uncle James."

"And we are going to look over them together--you and I are going to read these love-letters--before we burn them?" I asked, quick joy making my voice tremulous.

For a moment there was silence in the old room, then he turned away from the secretary, and came very close.

"Why burn them--now?" he asked, his own strong voice of a sudden more tremulous than mine. "Why burn them, now, darling? Why not--hand-- them--down?"

Then--in that instant--I knew what life was going to mean to me. And I felt as if I had the great joy of the world--hugged close--in a circle of radiance--like the _Madonna della Sedia_!

"I can be good--a very good woman--if I have your face before me," I told him.

After a while he smiled, then took my hand and drew me to a shadowy corner of the room.

"You haven't seen this yet," he said.

There was a crimson velvet curtain hanging before a picture, and he drew aside the folds.

"This is--Uncle James,"

The candlelight shone against the canvas, and glittered in dancing little waves over the name-plate on the frame.

"_Portrait of the Artist, by Himself._"

"Was it a comfort to her, I wonder?" my lover said, his thoughts only half with the past.

"A torturing comfort--the kind a woman like her demands," I answered.

"She had to go to it every hour in every day--and look at it--to make her heart ache, because it was only a picture. She was a human being--as well as a novelist, so that such as this could only add to her anguish. She wanted a _living_ face----"

"She wanted--this?"

He set the candlestick down and put both arms round me.

"She wanted--_this_?" he breathed.

His face was close above mine-waiting for the first kiss. A moment later it came--descending gently, like some blessed holy thing. And it was that.

"You are like him," I whispered. "Your face can make me good."

His arms tightened, and a smile escaped.

"And yours? What will you be like to me?" he asked.

I looked up, remembering.

"Like--just an American woman--a tormenting side-issue in your busy life?"

But he shook his head gravely.

"No--not that."

A cas.e.m.e.nt was open near by, and he drew me toward the shaft of radiance which fell into the shadowed room.

Across the courtyard, white now with moonlight, were the ruins of the abbey. There shone a softened l.u.s.ter through the s.p.a.ce of the absent window, and above, resplendent in her niche, stood the Virgin. Her head was bowed above the burden in her arms.

"Like that--_like that_!" he whispered.