At the sound of her own words came to her the full realization and understanding of herself. With a cry she freed herself from his supporting arm, stepped backward and looked at him. The color surged over her face and throat, her eyelids drooped; while her name was yet upon his lips she answered with a broken cry of ecstasy and abandonment. A moment and she was in his arms and their lips had met. How quiet it was in the long room, where the myrtle candles gave out their faint perfume and the low fire leaped upon the hearth! Thus for a time; then, growing faint with her happiness, she put up protesting hands. He made her sit in the great chair, and knelt before her, all youth and fire, handsome, ardent, transfigured by his passion into such a lover as a queen might desire. “Hail, Sultana!” he said, smiling, his eyes upon her diadem. “Now you are Arpasia again, and I am Moneses, and ready, ah, most ready, to die for you.” She also smiled. “Remember that I am to quickly follow you.” “When shall we marry?” he demanded. “The garden cries out for you, my love, and I wish to hear your footstep in my house. It hath been a dreary house, filled with shadows, haunted by keen longings and vain regrets. Now the windows shall be flung wide and the sunshine shall pour in. Oh, your voice singing through the rooms, your foot upon the stairs!” He took her hands and put them to his lips. “I love as men loved of old,” he said. “I am far from myself and my times. When will you become my wife?” She answered him simply, like the child that at times she seemed: “When you will. But I must be Arpasia again to-morrow night. The Governor hath ordered the play repeated, and Margery Linn could not learn my part in time.” He laughed, fingering the red silk of her hanging sleeve, feasting his eyes upon her dark beauty, so heightened and deepened in the year that had passed. “Then play to them--and to me who shall watch you well--to-morrow night. But after that to them never again! only to me, Audrey, to me when we walk in the garden at home, when we sit in the book-room and the candles are lighted. That day in May when first you came into my garden, when first I showed you my house, when first I rowed you home with the sunshine on the water and the roses in your hair! Love, love! do you remember?” “Remember?” she answered, in a thrilling voice. “When I am dead I shall yet remember! And I will come when you want me. After to-morrow night I will come.... Oh, cannot you hear the river? And the walls of the box will be freshly green, and the fruit-trees all in bloom! The white leaves drift down upon the bench beneath the cherry-tree.... I will sit in the grass at your feet. Oh, I love you, have loved you long!”