“I came back to Virginia,” he said, “and I looked for and found you in the heart of a flowering wood....  All that you imagined me to be, Audrey, that was I not.  Knight-errant, paladin, king among men,—­what irony, child, in that strange dream and infatuation of thine!  I was—­I am—­of my time and of myself, and he whom that day you thought me had not then nor afterwards form or being.  I wish you to be perfect in this lesson, Audrey.  Are you so?”

“Yes,” she sighed.  Her hands had fallen; she was looking at him with slowly parting lips, and a strange expression in her eyes.

He went on quietly as before, every feature controlled to impassivity and his arms lightly folded:  “That is well.  Between the day when I found you again and a night in the Palace yonder lies a summer,—­a summer!  To me all the summers that ever I had or will have,—­ten thousand summers!  Now tell me how I did in this wonderful summer.”

“Ignobly,” she answered.

He bowed his head gravely.  “Ay, Audrey, it is a good word.”  With a quick sigh he left his place, and walking to the uncurtained window stood there looking out upon the strip of moonlight and the screen of bushes; but when he turned again to the room his face and bearing were as impressive as before in their fine, still gravity, their repose of determination.  “And that evening by the river when you fled from me to Hugon”—­

“I had awaked,” she said, in a low voice.  “You were to me a stranger, and I feared you.”

“And at Westover?”

“A stranger.”

“Here in Williamsburgh, when by dint of much striving I saw you, when I wrote to you, when at last you sent me that letter, that piteous and cruel letter, Audrey?”

For one moment her dark eyes met his, then fell to her clasped hands.  “A stranger,” she said.

“The letter was many weeks ago.  I have been alone with my thoughts at Fair View.  And to-night, Audrey?”

“A stranger,” she would have answered, but her voice broke.  There were shadows under her eyes; her lifted face had in it a strained, intent expectancy as though she saw or heard one coming.

“A stranger,” he acquiesced.  “A foreigner in your world of dreams and shadows.  No prince, Audrey, or great white knight and hero.  Only a gentleman of these latter days, compact like his fellows of strength and weakness; now very wise and now the mere finger-post of folly; set to travel his own path; able to hear above him in the rarer air the trumpet call, but choosing to loiter on the lower slopes.  In addition a man who loves at last, loves greatly, with a passion that shall ennoble.  A stranger and your lover, Audrey, come to say farewell.”

Her voice came like an echo, plaintive and clear and from far away:  “Farewell.”

“How steadily do I stand here to say farewell!” he said.  “Yet I am eaten of my passion.  A fire burns me, a voice within me ever cries aloud.  I am whirled in a resistless wind....  Ah, my love, the garden at Fair View!  The folded rose that will never bloom, the dial where linger the heavy hours, the heavy, heavy, heavy hours!”