She had not before adequately guessed at happiness of this sort. It was as if her material world had always been at twilight--a soft, luminous, fragrant twilight, but twilight nevertheless--and that now, without the intervention of darkness, there had come the undreamed of wonder of dawn. She ran forth to meet the sunlight. She was eager, primal. She opened her arms to it. She gave herself to it because she gloried in it. Unsuspected capacities, unknown emotions welled in her, and she gave them forth and seized their purchase price. Her husband became in her eyes something glorious and marvellous. There was no more question of his years; she thought no more of that than any Greek girl would have questioned the youth of a condescending Zeus. He revealed; he seemed even to be the maker of what he revealed. She knew love at last; she was certain that she knew love. She was in love with love. For Stainton, and strangely in the same manner, that same magic prevailed. Alone with her he could not keep his hands from her loveliness; before strangers his eyes ravished it--his eyes shone and his cheeks flushed and his brain turned dizzy with the thought that this was his, all his own. In the desert of his life he had come finally to the long desired oasis. The journey to it, the waiting, the molten moons, and the weary afternoons of march had not robbed him of the ability to reach it and enjoy it. He was young--he was still young! "Let's climb the hill and see the sunset," he said to her. This was toward the end of their second week. They were in their sitting room in the hotel, Jim seated, in flannel shirt and walking trousers, but Muriel still in a flowing kimono, at rest on the floor, her head, with its wealth of blue-black hair, resting on her husband's knee, her arms about his waist. "No, no," she answered. "I don't want to see the sunset. Sunsets are so sad. They mean the end of something, and I don't want to think of endings, dear. We mustn't think of them, because we are at our beginning." He smiled and stroked her hair, and the touch, as always, thrilled him to a great tenderness. "Beginning?" he echoed. "Yes, that's it. It must be the beginning of something that will never have an end." Her dusky eyes glowed. "Never!" she repeated, and then, as an unreasoned wistfulness shot through her, she whispered: "It never will end, will it, Jim?" "How could it, sweetheart?" "But I mean it will always go on like this--just like this. I don't want us just to grow used to each other, just stupid and merely satisfied--just--just affectionate and fond." "We can never come to that. We love too much, Muriel." "Then don't let's forget ever," she pleaded, her arms tightening. "It must all be honeymoon, forever and forever." He raised her face and kissed her. "Always," he said--"always morning. We will never let the shadows lengthen; we will hold back the hands of the clock." He kissed her again. "You know that we will?" he asked.