To go to Sicily—­and with her!  The picture conjured up in Hector’s imagination made him thrill again.

Then he told her about it all, he charmed her fancy and excited her imagination, and by the time they came to their goal the feeling of jar had departed, and the dangerous sense of attraction—­of nearness—­had returned.

It was nearly seven o’clock, and here among the trees all was in a soft gloom of evening light.

“Is not this still and far away?” he said, as they sat on an old stone bench.  “I often stay the whole morning here when I spend a week at Versailles.”

“How peaceful and beautiful!  Oh, I would like a week here, too!” and Theodora sighed.

“You must not sigh, beautiful princess,” he implored, “on this our happy day.”

The slender lines of her figure seemed all drooping.  She reminded him more than ever of the fragment of Psyche in the Naples Museum.

“No, I must not sigh,” she said.  “But it seems suddenly to have grown sad—­the air—­what does it mean?  Tell me, you who know so many things?” There was a pathos in her voice like a child in distress.

It communicated itself to him, it touched some chords in his nature hitherto silent.  His whole being rushed out to her in tenderness.

“It seems to me it is because the time grows nearer when we must go back to the world.  First to dinner with the others, and then—­Paris.  I would like to stay thus always—­just alone with you.”

She did not refute this solution of her sadness.  She knew it was true.  And when he looked into her eyes, the blue was troubled with a mist as of coming tears.

Then passion—­more mighty than ever—­seized him once more.  He only felt a wild desire to comfort her, to kiss away the mist—­to talk to her.  Ah!

“Theodora!” he said, and his voice vibrated with emotion, while he bent forward and seized both her hands, which he lifted to his face—­she had not put on her gloves again after the tea—­her cool, little, tender hands!  He kissed and kissed their palms.

“Darling—­darling,” he said, incoherently, “what have I done to make your dear eyes wet?  Oh, I love you so, I love you so, and I have only made you sad.”

She gave a little, inarticulate cry.  If a wounded dove could sob, it might have been the noise of a dove, so beseeching and so pathetic.  “Oh, please—­you must not,” she said.  “Oh, what have you done!—­you have killed our happy day.”

And this was the beginning of his awakening.  He sat for many moments with his head buried in his hands.  What, indeed, had he done!—­and they would be turned out of their garden of Eden—­and all because he was a brute, who could not control his passion, but must let it run riot on the first opportunity.

He suffered intensely.  Suffered, perhaps, for the first time in his life.

She had not said one word of anger—­only that tone in her voice reached to his heart.