“Do you dream of me, Bayard?” she asked.

And he said:  “From the very first.  From that evening in the Champs-Elysees.  Your eyes, they’ve haunted me from the very first.  There was a dream of you,” he said, “that I had so often—­but I cannot quite remember, because my head hurts.  What is the matter with my head?  I was—­going somewhere.  It was so very important that I should go, but I have forgotten where it was and why I had to go there.  I remember only that you called to me—­called me back—­and I saw your eyes—­and I couldn’t go.  You needed me.”

“Ah, sorely, Bayard!  Sorely!” cried the girl above him.

“And now,” said he, whispering.

“Now?” she said.

“Coira, I love you,” said the man on the couch.

And Coira O’Hara gave a single dry sob.

She said:  “Oh, my dear love!  Now I wish that I might die after hearing you say that.  My life, Bayard, is full now.  It’s full of joy and gratefulness and everything that is sweet.  I wish I might die before other things come to spoil it.”

Ste. Marie—­or that part of him which lay at La Lierre—­laughed with a fine scorn, albeit very weakly.  “Why not live instead?” said he.  “And what can come to spoil our life for us? Our life!” he said again, in a whisper.  A flash of remembrance seemed to come to him, for he smiled and said, “Coira, we’ll go to Vavau.”

“Anywhere!” said she.  “Anywhere!”

“So that we go together.”

“Yes,” she said, gently, “so that we two go together.”  She tried with a desperate fierceness to make herself like the man before her, to put away, by sheer power of will, all memory, the knowledge of everything save what was in this little room, but it was the vainest of all vain efforts.  She saw herself for a thief and a cheat—­stealing, for love’s sake, the mere body of the man she loved while mind and soul were absent.  In her agony she almost cried out aloud as the words said themselves within her.  And she denied them.  She said:  “His mind may be absent, but his soul is here.  He loves me.  It is I, not that other.  Can I not have my poor little hour of pretence?  A little hour out of all a lifetime!  Shall I have nothing at all?”

But the voice which had accused her said, “If he knew, would he say he loves you?” And she hid her face, for she knew that he would not—­even if it were true.

“Coira!” whispered the man on the couch, and she raised her head.  In the half darkness he could not have seen how she was suffering.  Her face was only a warm blur to him, vague and sweet and beautiful, with tender eyes.  He said:  “I think—­I’m falling asleep.  My head is so very, very queer!  What is the matter with my head?  Coira, do you think I might be kissed before I go to sleep?”

She gave a little cry of intolerable anguish.  It seemed to her that she was being tortured beyond all reason or endurance.  She felt suddenly very weak, and she was afraid that she was going to faint away.  She laid her face down upon the couch where Ste. Marie’s head lay.  Her cheek was against his and her hair across his eyes.