“The object of my walk has been accomplished,” said John.

“Oh?” questioned she.

“I was walking in the hope, on the chance, that I might meet you,” he hardily explained.  “It’s such an age since I’ve seen you.  Are you making for the garden?  I pray you to be kind, and let me go with you.  I’ve been an exile and a wanderer—­I’ve been to Roccadoro.”

She had rebegun her ascension of the hill.  The path was steep, as well as rugged.  Sometimes John had to help her over a hard bit.  The touch of her hand, soft and warm, and firm too, in his; the sense of her closeness; the faint fragrance of her garments, of her hair,—­these things, you may be sure, went to his head, went to his heart.  The garden lay in a white blaze of sunshine, that seemed almost material, like an incandescent fluid; but the entrance to the avenue was dark and inviting.  “Let us,” he proposed, “go and sit on a marble bench under the glossy leaves of the ilexes, in the deep, cool shade; and let’s play that it’s a thousand years ago, and that you’re a Queen (white Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies), and that I’m your minstrel-man.”

“What song will you sing me?” asked she gaily, as they took their places on the marble bench.  It was semicircular, with a high carved back, (carved with the armorials of the Sforzas), and of course it was lichen-stained, grey and blue and green, yellow and scarlet.

     “White Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies,
       Fairer and dearer than dearest and fairest,
     To hear me sing, if it her sweet will is,—­
       Sing, minstrel-man, of thy love, an thou darest,”

trolled John, in his light barytone, to a tune, I imagine, improvised for the occasion.  “But if it’s a thousand years ago,” he laughed, “that song smacks too much perhaps of actuality, and I had best choose another.”

Maria Dolores joined in his laugh.  “I did not know you sang,” she said.  “Let me hear the other.”

“A song,” reflected he, “that I could sing with a good deal of feeling and conviction, would be ‘Give her but the least excuse to love me.’”

Maria Dolores all at once looked sober.

“Oughtn’t you to be careful,” she said, “to give her no excuse at all to love you, if you are really resolved never to ask her to be your wife?”

“That is exactly what I have given her,” answered John, “no excuse at all.  I should sing in a spirit purely academic,—­my song would be the utterance of a pious but hopeless longing, of the moth’s desire for the star.”

“But she, I suppose, isn’t a star,” objected Maria Dolores.  “She’s probably just a weak human woman.  You may have given her excuses without meaning to.”  There was the slightest quaver in her voice.

John caught his breath; he turned upon her almost violently.  But she was facing away from him, down the avenue, so that he could not get her eyes.

“In that case,” she said, “wouldn’t you owe her something?”