But during this time he did not allow himself to wonder or to examine, scarcely even to think.  The hours were golden hours, unrelated, he told himself, to anything else in his life or in his interests.  They were like pleasant dreams, very sweet while they endured, but to be put away and forgotten upon the waking.  Only in that long afterward he knew that they had not been put away, that they had been with him always, that the morning hour had remained in his thoughts all the rest of the long day, and that he had waked upon the morrow with a keen and exquisite sense of something sweet to come.

It was a strange fool’s paradise that the man dwelt in, and in some small, vague measure he must, even at the time, have known it, for it is certain that he deliberately held himself away from thought—­realization; that he deliberately shut his eyes, held his ears lest he should hear or see.

That he was not faithless to his duty has been shown.  He did his utmost there, but he was for the time helpless save for efforts to communicate with Richard Hartley, and those efforts could consume no more than ten minutes out of the weary day.

So he drifted, wilfully blind to bearings, wilfully deaf to Sound of warning or peril, and he found a companionship sweeter and fuller and more perfect than he had ever before known in all his life, though that is not to say very much, because sympathetic companionships between men and women are very rare indeed, and Ste. Marie had never experienced anything which could fairly be called by that name.  He had had, as has been related, many flirtations, and not a few so-called love-affairs, but neither of these two sorts of intimacies are of necessity true intimacies at all; men often feel varying degrees of love for women without the least true understanding or sympathy or real companionship.

He was wondering, as he bore round the corner of the rose-gardens on this day, in just what mood he would find her.  It seemed to him that in their brief acquaintance he had seen her in almost all the moods there are, from bitter gloom to the irrepressible gayety of a little child.  He had told her once that she was like an organ, and she had laughed at him for being pretentious and high-flown, though she could upon occasion be quite high-flown enough herself for all ordinary purposes.

He reached the cleared margin of the rond point, and a little cold fear stirred in him when he did not hear her singing under her breath, as she was wont to do when alone, but he went forward and she was there in her place upon the stone bench.  She had been reading, but the book lay forgotten beside her and she sat idle, her head laid back against the thick stems of shrubbery which grew behind, her hands in her lap.  It was a warm, still morning, with the promise of a hot afternoon, and the girl was dressed in something very thin and transparent and cool-looking, open in a little square at the throat and with sleeves which came only to her elbows.  The material was pale and dull yellow, with very vaguely defined green leaves in it, and against it the girl’s dark and clear skin glowed rich and warm and living, as pearls glow and seem to throb against the dead tints of the fabric upon which they are laid.