“A wrap!” she murmured.  “How absurd!  Come and let us sit under the cedar tree.  Those young people seem to have wandered off, and I want to talk to you.”

“I am content to listen,” he answered.  “It is a night for listeners, this!”

“I want to talk,” she continued, “and yet—­the words seem difficult.  These wonderful days!  How quickly they seem to have passed.”

“There are others to follow,” he answered, smiling.  “That is one of the joys of life here.  One can count on things!”

“Others for you!” she murmured.  “You have pitched your tent.  I came here only as a wanderer.”

“But scarcely a month ago,” he exclaimed, “you too—­”

“Don’t!” she interrupted.  “A month ago it seemed to me possible that I might live here always.  I felt myself growing young again.  I believed that I had severed all the ties which bound me to the days which have gone before.  I was wrong.  It was the sort of folly which comes to one sometimes, the sort of folly for which one pays.”

His face was almost white in the moonlight.  His deep-set grey eyes were fixed upon her.

“You were content—­a month ago,” he said.  “You have been in London for two days, and you have come back a changed woman.  Why must you think of leaving this place?  Why need you go at all?”

“My friend,” she said, softly, “I think that you know why.  It is very beautiful here, and I have never been happier in all my life.  But one may not linger all one’s days in the pleasant places.  One sleeps through the nights and is rested, but the days—­ah, they are different.”

“I cannot reason with you,” he said.  “You are too vague.  Yet—­you say that you have been contented here.”

“I have been happy,” she murmured.

“Then you must speak more plainly,” he insisted, a note of passion throbbing in his hoarse tones.  “I ask you again—­why do you talk of going back, like a city slave whose days of holiday are over?  What is there in the world more beautiful than the gifts the gods shower on us here?  We have the sun, and the sea, and the wind by day and by night—­this!  It is the flower garden of life.  Stay and pluck the roses with me.”

“Ah, my friend,” she murmured, “if that were possible!”

She sank down into the seat under the cedar tree.  Her hands were clasped nervously together, her head was downcast.

“Your words,” she continued, her voice sinking almost to a whisper, yet lacking nothing in distinctness, “are like wine.  They mount to the head, they intoxicate, they tempt!  And yet all the time one knows that it is not possible.  Surely you yourself—­in your heart—­must know it!”

“Not I!” he answered, fiercely.  “The world would have claimed me if it could, but I laughed at it.  Our destinies are our own.  With our own fingers we mould and shape them.”

“There is the little voice,” she said, “the little voice, which rings even through our dreams.  Life—­actual, militant life, I mean—­may have its vulgarities, its weariness and its disappointments, but it is, after all, the only place for men and women.  The battle may be sordid, and the prizes tinsel—­yet it is only the cowards who linger without.”