“Love-in-a-mist! Blue eyes in tangled hair-- Wet eyes that brim through lashes of dark rain-- Where have I known your mystery, your pain? In what green gardens kissed your soft despair? “There was a parting once--but when? but where? I ask it of my heart, and ask in vain-- Only a wild voice weeps across the main: ‘Love-in-a-mist! Wet eyes in tangled hair!’” He ended; and a dead silence ensued. Then the girl, moving like one half stupefied, and with a sigh that seemed to rend her bosom, took a single step away and stopped. “Forgive me,” said Tiretta. His mood was spent, exhausted for the moment; he could only utter that broken prayer. She put her hand to her eyes, and seemed to stumble. He was by her side in a moment. “I did not mean it!” he said hoarsely. “God knows what tempted me!” She looked up at him then very piteously. “What gardens?” she whispered, as if she could have wept. He answered like one in a dream: “There were green bays; and the mist was over everything. Strange shapes came and went in it--they shrank and dilated. And the eyes of the women were like heaven in April--strange wet blue eyes behind the rain. They come out of sleep: they have haunted me since childhood--the strange eyes--the wild visions of the North. Ah, do not think me mad, Madonna!” His breast was heaving, his hands entreating. She moved on, motioning to him to walk beside her. As they passed slowly together through the sweet scented shadows, he grew more composed--and she also, it seemed. Presently she spoke to him, in a low earnest voice: “Will you try to forget it--never to let it be again?” She held out her hand; and, like a man who delivers his own death-warrant, he detached the faded flower from his breast, and laid it reverently in that soft palm. “Condemn me,” he muttered, walking with bowed head, “to a traitor’s death. I deserve the worst.” “It was a momentary possession,” she answered. “The evil thing is gone.” He sighed. “As I must go--as I must go, lest it come again.” She did not answer. Stealing a look at her, he saw something in her face which made him knot his fingers together, as if forcibly to control some scarce endurable emotion. And so they wandered on, as it were in a tragic trance, both soul-stricken and both dumb. Threading the golden trees, as if always to weave deeper the silences between themselves and the common world, they came out presently, unconscious of how they had reached it, upon a green sward sloping to the river. And there the man turned, and gazed upon his companion. “Do you not recognise the place?” he said--“of my shame?” He saw her lips move, and the tears gather in her eyes. “No, of mine.” Could mortal fortitude forbear--endure further? With one mad step he had her in his arms, and their lips met. CHAPTER XI. SWEET BASIL