She appeared to be so intent, so absorbed on her bouquet tying that he involuntarily leaned nearer to watch her. A fragrance faintly fresh seemed to grow in the air around him as the hill-breeze stirred her hair. If it came from the waving grass-tops, or the honeyed fruit or from her hair, or perhaps from those small, smooth hands, he did not know. For a long while they sat there without speaking, she steadily intent on her tying. Then, while still busy with a cluster, her slim fingers hesitated, wavered, relaxed; her hands fell to her lap, and she remained so, head bent, motionless. After a moment he spoke, but she made no answer. Through and through him shot the thrilling comprehension of that exquisite avowal, childlike in its silent directness, charming in its surprise. A wave of tenderness and awe mounted within him, touching his bronzed cheeks with a deeper colour. "If you will, Chrysos," he said in a still voice. She lifted her head and looked directly at him, and in her questioning gaze there was nothing of fear--merely the question. "I can't bear to have you go," she said. "I can't go--alone." "Could you--care for me?" "I love you, Chrysos." Her eyes widened in wonder: "You--you don't _love_ me--do you?" "Yes," he said, "I do. Will you marry me, Chrysos?" Her fascinated gaze met his in silence. He drew her close to his shoulder; she laid her cheek against it. CHAPTER XV Toward the end of the first week in August Strelsa wrote to Quarren: "Sometimes I wonder whether you realise how my attitude toward everything is altering. Things which seemed important no longer appear so in the sunlit tranquillity of this lovely place. Whatever it is that seems to be changing me in various ways is doing it so subtly, yet so inexorably, that I scarcely notice any difference in myself until some morning I awake with such a delicious sense of physical well-being and such a mental happiness apropos of nothing at all except the mere awaking into the world again, that, thinking it over, I cannot logically account for it. "Because, Rix, my worldly affairs seem to be going from bad to worse. I know it perfectly well, yet where is that deadly fear?--where is the dismay, the alternate hours of panic and dull lethargy--the shrinking from a future which only yesterday seemed to threaten me with more than I had strength to endure--menace me with what I had neither the will nor the desire to resist? "Gone, my friend! And I am either a fool or a philosopher, but whichever I am, I am a happy one. "I wish to tell you something. Last winter when they fished me out of my morbid seclusion, I thought that the life I then entered upon was the only panacea for the past, the only oblivion, the only guarantee for the future.