“I have always wondered if happiness were as happy as people thought,” she said gravely, “and now I know, I know.”

“And is it really?” he asked, with the confident smile which piqued her even while it fascinated.

For answer she lifted to him “the seraphic look” which he had never seen in any face but hers; and as he met her eyes it appeared to him that all other women whom he had loved were but tinted shadows—­that they were one and all utterly devoid of the mystery by which passion lives.  Here in her face he saw at last the charm and the wonder of sex made luminous; and while he watched her emotion quiver on her lips, he began to ask himself if this were not the assurance in his own heart of a feeling that might endure for life?  Would this, too, change and perish as his impulses had changed and perished until to-day?

“Shall I tell you what I have been thinking since last night?” she questioned in a voice that was like a song to his ears, “it is that I have been all my life a plant in a dark cellar, groping toward the light and never finding it—­always groping, groping.”

She leaned toward him, placing her hands, the lovely, delicate hands he loved, upon his shoulders, “I’ve grown to the light!  I’ve grown to the light!” she whispered joyously.

He raised her hand to his lips, and his teeth closed softly over each slender finger one by one.

“So I am the light?” he enquired with tender humour.

She shook her head.  “Not you, but love.”

A short laugh broke from him.  “But where, my dear sweetheart,” he retorted? “would love be without me?”

“I don’t dare to think,” she was too earnest to take his jest with lightness, “it is strange, isn’t it?—­that but for you I should never have known—­this.”

“Who can tell?  There might have come along another fellow and you’d probably have made love quite as prettily to a substitute.”

“Never!” she shook her head with an indignant protest, “and you?” she added softly after a moment.

“And I?  What?”

“Without me could you have felt it quite like this?”

She waited breathlessly, but the ironic spirit had got the better of his tenderness.

“My dear girl,” he rejoined, “what a question?”

“But could you?-tell me,” she implored in sudden passion.

“Well, I devoutly hope so,” he answered lightly, “it’s a thing I should’nt like to have missed, you know.”

He leaned back closing his eyes; and immediately, without warning and against his will, there rose before him the seductive face of Madame Alta, and he recalled her exquisite voice, with its peculiar high note of piercing sweetness.  Then he remembered his wife, and, one by one, the other women whom he had loved and forgotten or merely forgotten without loving.  They meant so little in his existence now, and yet once, each in her own bad time had engrossed utterly his senses.  In what rare quality of sentiment could this love differ from those lesser loves that had gone before?