“I am so ignorant,” Miriam Gale had said, pushing his head back that she might look at his whole face at once.  “I am almost afraid of you—­but I love you, and I shall learn all these things.”

It was all inconceivable and strange.  The glamour of love mingled with the soft, fitful firelight reflected in Miriam’s eyes, till they twain seemed the only realities.  So that when she began to speak of her husband, it seemed at first no more to John Arniston than if she had told him that her shoeblack was yet alive.  He and she had no past; only a future, instant and immediate, waiting for them to-morrow.

How many times did they not move apart after a last farewell?  John Arniston could not tell, though to content himself he tried to count.  Then, their eyes drawing them together again, they had stood silent in the long pause when the life throbs to and fro and the heart thunders in the ears.  At last, with “To-morrow!” for an iterated watchword between them, they parted, and John Arniston found himself in the street.  It was the full rush of the traffic of London; but to him it was all strangely silent.  Everything ran noiselessly to-night.  Newsboys mouthed the latest horror, and John Arniston never heard them.  Mechanically he avoided the passers-by, but it was with no belief in their reality.  To him they were but phantom shapes walking in a dream.  His world was behind him—­and before.  The fragrance of the bliss of dreams was on his lips.  His heart bounded with the thought of that “To-morrow” which they had promised to one another.  The white Italian cities which he had visited alone gleamed whiter than ever before him.  Was it possible that he should sit in the great square of St. Mark’s with Miriam Gale by his side, the sun making a patchwork of gold and blue among the pinnacles of the Church of the Evangelist?  There, too, he saw, as he walked, the Lido shore, and the long sickle sweep of the beach.  The Adriatic slumbrously tossed up its toy surges, and lo! a tall girl in white walked hand-in-hand with him.  He caught his breath.  He had just realised that it was all to begin to-morrow.  Then again he saw that glimmering white figure throw itself down in an agony of parting into the low chair, kneeling beside which his life began.

But stop—­what was it after all that Miriam had been saying?  Something about her husband?  Had he heard aright—­that he was still alive, only dead to her?—­“Dead for many years,” was her word.  After all, it was no matter.  Nothing mattered any more.  His goddess had stepped down to him with open arms.  He had heard the beating of her heart.  She was a breathing, loving woman.

“To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.”  It seemed so far away.  And were there indeed other skies, blue and clear, in Italy, in which the sun shone?  It seemed hard to believe with the fog of London, yellow and thick like bad pea-soup, taking him stringently in the throat.