“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy as I am to-night,” she answered simply, and then after a pause she let fall word by word, “After all, it takes so little to make me happy.”

“One can tell that to look at you.  You have the air of happiness.  I noticed it the first moment I saw you.  And yet you have not had an easy life.  There must have been terrible hours for you in the past.”

“No, I haven’t had an easy life, but I love it.  I mean I love living.”

“I know, I understand,” he said softly.  “It is the true American spirit—­optimism springing out of a struggle.  Do you know you have always made me think of the American spirit at its best—­of its unquenchable youth, its gallantry, its self-reliance—­”

They walked back slowly through the hot, close streets, and sat for an hour beside her window-sill on which a rose geranium was blooming in an earthen pot.  Now and then a breeze entered warily, stealing the fragrance from the rose geranium, and rippling the dark, straying tendrils of Gabriella’s hair.  By the dim light she saw the wistful pallor of his face, and his blue eyes, with their exalted look, which moved her heart to an inexpressible tenderness.

“You are so different from other physicians,” she said in perplexity, “I can’t think of you as one, no matter how hard I try.  All the others I have known, even old Dr. Walker, were materialists.”

“Well, I got in some way.  There are fools in every school, I suppose.  But if it’s any comfort to you, they’ve done their best to get rid of me.  They don’t like my theories.”  When he talked of his work he seemed all at once another man to her, and she discerned presently, while she listened to his earnest voice, that he was one of the men whose emotional natures are nourished by an abstract and impersonal passion—­by the passion for science, for truth in its concrete form.  After all, he was a mystic only in his eyes.  Beneath his dreamer’s face he was a scientist to the last drop of his blood, to the last fibre of his being.  “He can’t be hurt deeply through the heart,” she thought; “only through the mind.”

“I’ve wondered about you all summer,” he repeated presently, “and yet I kept away—­partly, I suppose, because I was thinking too much of you.”

At his change of tone from the impersonal to the tender all the frozen self-pity in her heart seemed to melt suddenly, threatening in its overflow the very foundations of her philosophy.  The temptation to yield utterly, to rest for a while not on her strength, but on his, assailed her with the swiftness and the violence of a spiritual revulsion.  For an instant she surrendered to the uncontrollable force of this desire; then she drew quickly back while the world about her—­the room, the window, the bare skeleton of the elevated road, the street, and even the rose geranium blooming on the sill—­became as remote and impalpable as a phantom.

“It has been a long summer,” she heard herself saying from a distance in a thin and colourless voice.