"Do you remember that night in Venice?" she said again, almost below her breath. And in the pause that followed the whispered words, the most wonderful--the most wholly perfect--incident of her life occurred. The voice that had power to chill or stir her, spoke her name; the hands she had believed closed to her for ever were held out towards her. Gore came slowly forward across the shadowed room. "I do remember," he said. "I have never forgotten, I never shall forget." CHAPTER XIII Nearly three weeks had passed since the night of Lady Diana Tuffnell's dance; and Clodagh was once more occupying her London flat. The season was long since dead; the fashionable world had betaken itself to its customary haunts; London had, in the eyes of society, become intolerable; and yet it seemed to her, as she woke each morning and looked across the park, lying under a haze of heat, that she had never known the great city until now; that she had never experienced the exhilaration that can lie in its crowded, strenuous life until now, when her own existence--her own soul seemed lifted above it on the wings of happiness. The hours, the days, the weeks that had followed the night of Lady Diana's dance had been a chain of golden dreams, linked one to the other. From the moment that Gore had made his confession, the face of the world had altered for her. One overwhelming fact had coloured the universe. The fact that he loved--that he needed her. They had entered into no lucid explanations in the moments that had followed the confession; for men and women in love have no need of such mundane things. With the glorious egotism of nature, they are content with the primitive consciousness that each lives and is close to the other. Clodagh had, it is true, made some faint and deprecating allusion to the past--to Gore's first disapproval, and subsequent avoidance of her. And he had paused in his flow of talk and looked at her with sudden seriousness. "I have never disapproved of you," he had said. "I have never felt it was my place to disapprove." "But you have avoided me?" "Never intentionally. I have watched you; I have studied you, since we have been here together." "And what have you seen?" Clodagh had remembered the card-room and Serracauld--the rose garden and Deerehurst--with a quick, faint sense of fear. But Gore had taken her hand and, with quiet courtesy, had raised it to his lips. "I have seen--or believe I have seen--that though you may like these people, may be amused by them, may even court them, not one of them is more to you now than they were in Venice. That is what I believe. Am I right?" And Clodagh--in sudden relief, in sudden gratitude for his faith--had caught his hand passionately between her own, and looked up confidently into his face. "You are right!" she had cried. "Oh, you are right! They are nothing to me! Nothing!--nothing!"