"Perhaps she is the woman of my dreams, the impossible ideal which all men imagine and no man ever meets. If this should be the case, Fate has played me a cruel trick in making her my cousin's wife. She does not love him--No!--she loves nothing except a vague fancy, which will turn to a passionate reality when she becomes a mother. "Guy is living in a fool's paradise, for he takes her sympathetic nature for a loving one. Some day he will be undeceived and find that he loves a statue, a snow queen, who can never respond to his passion. When she becomes a mother she will find her soul, which will only awaken at the cry of a child; but at present she is an Undine--a faint, white ghost--the shadow of what a woman should be. "Do I love her?--I don't know. There is something too spiritual about this new passion of mine. It is as evanescent as the dew, as unreal as moonlight; there is no flesh and blood reality about such platonisms. I am no Pygmalion to worship a statue. Still, if the gods endowed this statue with life--What then? It is difficult to say. I would love her. I would adore her, and yet--she is the wife of my cousin and I--I am the fool of fortune." With a dreary laugh he rose from his seat, feeling cramped and chill in the grim shadows. He went outside, but the sunlight had died out of the sky and all the beautiful, brilliant world was dull and grey; the magic light had passed away from on land and water, leaving a sombre, weary earth, across which the wind blew cold and bleak. "Rose-coloured spectacles! Rose-coloured spectacles!" he muttered, plunging into the gloomy stairs of the street. "If I could only buy a pair." Peppino and Tista were waiting for him at the Albergo Garibaldi, and in a few minutes he was on his way back to the Villa Medici. The sun had disappeared behind the distant hills, and in a rose-coloured sky hung the faint shadow of a waning moon, looking thin and haggard amid the fast-fading splendour. "She is like the moon," he sighed sadly, "like the pale, cold moon. As fair--as calm--and as lifeless as that dead world." CHAPTER IX. "OH, WILT THOU BE MY BRIDE, KATHLEEN?" "Say 'Yes' or 'No' Before we part. Come joy or woe, Say 'Yes' or 'No.' I love thee so! Hope fills my heart. Say 'Yes' or 'No' Before we part." There was no doubt that Angus Macjean was very much in love with Miss Sheldon, which to wiseacres would appear rather foolish, seeing that he had only known her three weeks. But as, according to Kit Marlowe, "He never loved who loved not at first sight," Otterburn had fulfilled such practical advice to the letter, and however rapidly love had sprung up in his heart in that short space of three weeks, it had become sufficiently powerful to dominate all his other faculties.