“I don’t think so. Perhaps that was the one—the best bedroom—which Olifant always kept locked.” She felt ashamed of her unworthy suspicion; glad at the loyal keeping of a promise, to the extent of not allowing a visitor even a peep inside the forbidden chamber. “I think Blaise Olifant is one of the finest types England breeds,” she said warmly. There was a touch of jealous fear in his swift glance; but he replied with equal warmth: “You needn’t tell me that. Brave, modest, of sensitive honour—Ah! A man with a mind so cultivated that he seems to know nothing until you talk with him, and then you find that he knows everything. I love him.” “I’m glad to hear you say that.” “Why? Do you admire him so much?” “It isn’t that,” she parried. “It’s on your account. One man’s generous praise of another does one’s heart good.” She threw out her arms as though to embrace the rolling park of infinite sward and majestic trees. “I love big things,” she said. Whereupon Alexis Triona thanked his stars for having led him along the true path. Who can say that, in after years, these twain, when they shall have grown old and have gone through whatever furnaces Fate—either personal destiny or the Fate of Social Institutions—may prepare for them, will not retain imperishable memories of the idyll of that sweet spring day? There they sat, youth spiritually communing with youth; the girl urged by feminine instinct to love him for the dangers he had passed; the young man aflame with her beauty, her charm, her dryad elusiveness. Here, for him, was yet another aspect of her, free, unseizable in the woodland setting. And for her, another aspect of him, the simple, clean-cut Englishman, divested of vague and disquieting Russian citizenship, the perfect companion, responsive to every chord struck by the spirit of the magic afternoon. In the years to come, who can say that they will not remember this sweet and delicate adventure of their souls creeping forth in trembling reconnaissance one of the other? Perhaps it will be a more precious memory to the woman than to the man. Men do not lay things up in lavender as women do. If he had spoken, declared his passion in lover’s set terms, perhaps her heart might have been caught by the glamour of it all, and she might have surrendered to his kisses, and they might have journeyed back to London in a state of unreprehensible yet commonplace beatitude. And the memory would possibly have been marked by a white stone rising stark in an airless distance. But he did not speak, held back by a rare reverence of her maidenhood and her perfect trust; and in her heart flowered gratitude for his sensitiveness to environment. So easy for a maladroit touch to mar the perfection of an exquisite hour of blue mist and mystery. So, again, who knows but that in the years to come the memory will be marked by a fragrance, a shimmer of leaves, a haze over green sward, incorporated impalpably with the dear ghost of an immortal day?