“Money isn’t everything here below,” said she.  “I have your own word for that.”

“What else counts,” said he, “when you wish to ask a woman to marry you?”

“Oh, many things,” said she.  “Difference of rank, for example.”

“That wouldn’t count with me,” said the democratic fellow, handsomely.  “I shouldn’t give two thoughts to differences of rank.”

Maria Dolores smiled—­at her secret reflections, I suppose.

“But poverty puts it out of all question,” John moodily went on.  “I couldn’t ask a woman to come and share with me an income of sixpence a week.  Especially as I have grounds for believing that she’s in rather affluent circumstances herself.  Oh, I wish I were rich!” He repeated this aspiration in a groan.

“Poor, poor young man!” she commiserated him, while her eyes, which she held perseveringly averted, were soft with sympathy and gay with mirth.  “When do you begin your gardening?”

“Oh, don’t mock me!” he cried, with an imploring gesture.  “You know, joking apart, that it’s child’s play for a man of my age, with no profession and no special talent, to fancy he can turn to and earn money.  I might, if I made supernatural exertions, and if Fortune went out of her way to favour me, add a maximum of another sixpence to my weekly budget.  No, there’s never a hope for me on sea or land.  I must e’en bear it, though I cannot grin withal.”

“Ah, well,” said Maria Dolores, to comfort him, “these attacks, I have read, are often as short as they are sharp.  Let us trust you’ll soon rally from this one.  How long have they generally lasted in the past?”

John’s face grew dark with upbraiding; the sea-blue of his eyes, the gold of his hair and beard, the pink of his complexion visibly grew dark.

“You are so needlessly unkind,” he said, “that you don’t deserve to hear the true answer to your question.”

She studied the half-obliterated fresco on the wall beside her.

“All the same,” said he, “you shall hear it.  If falling in love were my habit, no doubt I shouldn’t take it so hard.  But the simple truth, though I am thirty years old, is that I have never before felt so much as a heart-flutter for any woman.  And, since you cite your reading, I have read that a fire which may merely singe the surface of green wood, will entirely consume the dry.”

She continued to study the ancient painting.  Her fingers were playing with the ends of her lace veil.

“Besides,” he went on, “if I had been in love a dozen times, it wouldn’t signify.  For I should have been in love with ordinary usual human women.  They’re the only sort I ever met—­till I met her.  She’s of a totally different order—­as distinct from them as ...  What shall I say?  Oh, as unlike them as starfire is unlike dull clay.  Starfire—­starfire—­the wonderful, high, white-burning starfire of her spirit, that’s the thing that strikes you most in her.  It shines through her.  It shines in her eyes, it shines in her hair, her adorable, soft, dark, warm and fragrant hair; it shines in her very voice; it shines in every word she utters, even in the unkindest.”