No drive that afternoon. The prince departed, luggage, valet, and all. I did not see Mercedes till just before dinner. She looked pale, but not unhappy. As I took her in to dinner, she said: “Can I see you, alone, this evening?” During dinner the wild idea flashed across me to take her to the spot she had dreamed of, the spot where I had seen her in that strange vision twenty years ago. The very thought of it exhilarated me. I was excited. I felt as if each moment that passed a year was slipping from my shoulders. I was rejuvenating. I hurried the men over their wine. Then I went into the drawing-room and got mammy away into a corner. “Don’t look surprised at what I am going to say,” I said in an undertone. “And don’t exclaim, or look round. You must do something for me.” She stared at me. I must have looked wild, but very quietly she said: “If I can.” “It is the merest trifle,” I said. “I wish to show the princess a certain spot in the grounds by moonlight. Keep them all amused till we come back.” She said something, but I did not listen. I left her at once. I made Lady Forwood sit down at the piano, and when everyone was attentive (she plays well) I told Mercedes to slip away, quietly, soon after I left the room, and I went into the hall. It was a glorious night, with a brilliant golden moon that bathed everything in a warm light. Presently she came gliding into the hall and up to me like a ghost, and would have seated herself on the divan, but I said, “No, the garden,” and wrapping her light cloak, which was hanging near, round her shoulders, I took her out. Out into the stillness. It was so still, we could hear the voices of the people in the drawing-room, and the sound of our footsteps on the gravel was so loud I fancied that it must be audible in the house. We walked on for some time, side by side, in silence. Presently we came to the pine grove. The light fell through the straight rows of slender trunks as the sunlight falls by day, only it was a yellowish white that silvered the sandy water tracks, glimmered upon the pebbles, and made fairy dells of the clumps of bracken. By common accord we halted here. As we stood still, a soft night wind arose and went sighing among the pine-tops; the feathered crests of the slim trees nodded to one another as if, so it seemed to me, they mourned my folly. And she? She drew a long breath. “This beautiful scent!” she said. “How I love it!” “Have you pinewoods in Spain?” I asked. “Such as this? No,” she said, beginning to walk again. There was not a shadow of embarrassment at being alone with me, in almost a forest, at this hour. She is too simple-minded for that. “But this perfume, it is like a room in our (I mean my father’s) castle in the country in Spain.” She explained that the Duque’s drawing-rooms, as we call them, were each furnished in some luxurious material. One was all malachite, from the doors to the table furniture; another was silver, another cedar.