“Oh?  Are you still in love with her?” Maria Dolores wondered.  “It is so long since you have spoken of her, I thought your heart was healed.”

“If I have not spoken of her, it has been because I was under the impression that you had tacitly forbidden me to do so,” John informed her.

“So I had,” she admitted.  “But I find that there is such a thing—­as being too well obeyed.”

She brought out her last words, after the briefest possible suspension, hurriedly, in a voice that quailed a little, as if in terror of its own audacity.  John, with tingling pulses, turned upon her.  But she, according to her habit at such times, refused him her eyes.  He could see, though, that her eyelashes trembled.

“Oh,” he cried, “I love her so much, I need her so, I suppose I shall end by doing the dishonourable thing.”

“Did you ever tell her that you were Lord Blanchemain’s heir?” she asked.

“I never thought of it.  Why should I?” said John.

“When you were bemoaning your poverty, as an obstacle to marriage, you might have remembered that your birth counted for something.  With us Austrians, for example, birth counts for almost everything,—­for infinitely more than money.”

“I think,” said John, as one impersonally generalizing, “that a fortune-hunter with a tuft is the least admirable variety of that animal.  I wish you could see what beautiful little rose-white ears she has, and the lovely way in which her dark hair droops about them.”

“How long ago was it,” mused she, “that love first made people fancy they saw beauties which had no real existence?”

“Oh, the moment you see a thing, it acquires real existence,” John returned.  “The act of seeing is an act of creation.  The thing you see has real existence on your retina and in your mind, if nowhere else, and that is the realest sort of real existence.”

“Then she must thank you as the creator of her ‘rose-white’ ears,” laughed Maria Dolores.  “I wonder whether that sunset has any real existence, and whether it is really as splendid as it seems.”

The west had become a vast sea of gold, a pure and placid sea of many-tinted gold, bounded and intersected and broken into innumerable wide bays and narrow inlets by great cloud-promontories, purple and rose and umber.  Directly opposite, just above the crest-line of the hills, hung the nearly full moon, pale as a mere phantom of itself.  And from somewhere in the boscage at the garden’s end came a lool-lool-lool-lioo-lio, deep and long-drawn, liquid and complaining, which one knew to be the preliminary piping-up of Philomel.

“If some things,” said John, “derive their beauty from the eye of the beholder, the beauty of other things is determined by the presence or absence of the person you long to share all beautiful visions with.  The sky, the clouds, the whole air and earth, this evening, seem to me beauty in its ultimate perfection.”