"But even if I had not been able to win your heart, I should still have loved you always and ever, and held myself your knight, ready to obey your slightest or your most difficult command, my queen," he avowed with boyish enthusiasm. "I feel that it was preordained that I should love you, and I should have readily fulfilled my fate, even if you had never been able to care for me in return." She sighed and shook her head. "Ah, Geoffrey, do you love me indeed? Almost I doubt it." "You doubt it? Evarne!" "You can't imagine what I mean? Sit by my side and I'll explain." Reclining delightfully in Geoff's arms, her slender arched feet curled up on the couch, she expounded her startling statement. "When you say that it would not make any--well, not much--difference in your feelings towards me if I did not care for you in return, I wonder if you are not indulging in a state of mind peculiar to poetic temperaments such as yours, my dearest, and I feel jealous." "Dear child--jealous of whom?" "Cannot you guess? Why, of Love itself. I believe you are so happy in having me to care for, simply because you delight in loving. You are a worshipper of love in the abstract; you fairly glory in that frame of mind people call 'being in love.' The possession of the emotion means more to you than the possession of any particular woman. There are some terrible people like that. They would rather their mistress died than that she should destroy the love she had awakened in their hearts." "Now, fair Diotima, just please name one single individual who ever felt that way." "Easily! What about Dante, the patron saint of such sinners? Do you suppose he could have had any ordinary personal affection for his precious Beatrice? Why, he only saw her twice, or something of that sort, and she was respectably married to somebody else, yet she coloured his whole life, and he seems to have been quite contented. And he is never without disciples--a few. Oh, I know you--people who are in love with Love itself." "Yes? Go on telling me about them." Interested though he was in her slightest word, Geoffrey, man-like, was not giving all his mind to Evarne's ideas. He was enthralled by the contemplation of her sinuous, supple form, her tenderly waving hair and satin-smooth skin, and the live beams of her glancing eye; he was glorying in the dulcet music of her voice.