Suddenly, for she had not seen him approach, she was conscious that he was at her side, looking down at her beneath a lantern which was beginning to flicker. A sense of deep peace--of perfect contentment with the world as God planned it--took possession of her. Even the minutes of suspense seemed good because they had brought at last this swift rush of happiness. Every line of his face--of that face which had captured her imagination as though it had been the face of her dreams--was illumined by the quivering light that gilded the poplars. His eyes were so close to hers that she saw little flecks of gold on the brown, and she grew dizzy while she looked into them, as if she stood on a height and feared to turn lest she should lose her balance and fall. A delicious stillness, which began in her brain and passed to her throbbing pulses, enveloped her like a perfume. While she stood there she was incapable of thought--except the one joyous thought that this was the moment for which she had waited since the hour of her birth. Never could she be the same afterwards! Never could she be unhappy again in the future! For, like other mortals in other ecstatic instants, she surrendered herself to the intoxicating illusion of their immortality. After that silence, so charged with emotion for them both, it seemed that when he spoke it must be to utter words that would enkindle the world to beauty; but he said merely: "Is this dance free? I came only to speak to you." His look added, "I came because my longing had grown unbearable"; and though she replied only to his words, it was his look that made the honeysuckle-trellis, the yellow lanterns, and the sky, with its few soft stars, go round like coloured balls before her eyes. The world melted away from her, and the distance between her and the whirling figures in white muslin seemed greater than the distance between star and star. She had the sense of spiritual remoteness, of shining isolation, which ecstasy brings to the heart of youth, as though she had escaped from the control of ordinary phenomena and stood in a blissful pause beyond time and space. It was the supreme moment of love; and to her, whose soul acknowledged no other supremacy than that of love, it was, also, the supreme moment of life.