“I have so much to say--and yet I have nothing. I think you have come into my heart, and that no words are needed there.” “Yet we must talk, being mortal, for lucidity’s sake. Tell me, how did I steal in?” “I cannot. Your voice made me sorry; and then--my own cruelty. Were you thinking of that when you sang to Bissy?” “I suppose so.” “I was frightened of myself, monsieur.” “Monsieur?” “What can I call you?” “I will tell you. My real name is not that I am known by--a nom de guerre, in literal truth. My own I laid to rest long years ago, never again to be revived. But love knows its own resurrections. I will tell you. It is for your sweet ears, for your sweet lips alone; and you will keep my secret, Isabel?” She promised, and to the end was faithful to her vow. “And now,” said he, “where is my flower?” To his rapture, she brought the little withered spray out from her bosom, and kissed it once and gave it to him. “It shall lie on my dead heart,” he said. Her voice was full, her eyes were shining, as she answered: “It gave me a living one, I think. O, love, the strangeness and the sorrow of your music! It robbed me of my soul, of my will, that day I listened here.” He gazed at her, his eyes rapt and dreaming. “It was the rain,” he said. “Such a wild wet day, after long heat, brings to me always, like no other, the passion of the past.” “Your past?” “How can I say? Old pictures, old hauntings, young dead faces--the air is full of their streaming, the wind of their voices. And I know them, yet they are strange to me; I hear them, yet they utter no word. They were all born and perished ages before I reached the world; they come out of the wild beautiful places, the mists and mysteries of the green gardens where I kissed your eyes--yes, _your_ beautiful eyes, beloved.” “Not to part?” she whispered. He did not answer, but he put his lips to the dead flower before he hid it in his breast. “Are you terrified of me?” he said. “Do you think me mad?” And she answered, dwelling on his face: “Be mad, if to abandon me were reason.” Drowned in that sunny ecstasy, they both stood silent for awhile. Then Tiretta sighed and stretched his shoulders, as if in blissful waking from a dream; and he looked with a tender humour at his comrade. “I am not all moonstruck,” he said. “I would not have you think that of me, lady. I have rubbed shoulders with life. I can be practical on occasion. This tendency to rhapsodising is a sort of possession that visits me at times. It puts visions in my mind and words on my lips. Hold the North responsible for it.” “You speak so strangely of the North,” she said wistfully; “and often I think your eyes are turned to it.”