He laughed at her certainty.  “You were about eleven years old when you saw it last, weren’t you?”

“No, you’ve got it wrong.  It was when we came to France to live that I was eleven, and of course I stopped going to Ashley regularly for vacations then.  But I went back for several summers in the old house with Cousin Hetty, when I was in America for college, after Mother died.”

“Oh well, I don’t care what it’s like,” he said, “except that it’s the place where I’m going to live with you.  Any place on earth would seem wide enough and deep enough, if I had you there.”

“Isn’t it funny,” she mused, “that I should know so much more about it than you?  To think how I played all around your uncle’s mill and house, lots of times when I was a little girl, and never dreamed . . .”

“No funnier than all the rest of it,” he demurred.  “Once you grant our existing and happening to meet out of all the millions of people in the world, you can’t think up anything funnier.  Just the little two-for-a-cent queerness of our happening to meet in Rome instead of in Brooklyn, and your happening to know the town where my uncle lived and owned the mill he left me . . . that can’t hold a candle for queerness, for wonderfulness, compared to my having ever laid eyes on you.  Suppose I’d never come to Rome at all?  When I got the news of Uncle Burton’s death and the bequest, I was almost planning to sail from Genoa and not come to southern Italy at all.”

She shook her head confidently.  “You can’t scare me with any such hideous possibilities.  It’s not possible that we shouldn’t ever have met, both of us being in the world.  Didn’t you ever study chemistry?  Didn’t they teach you there are certain elements that just will come together, no matter how you mix them up with other things?”

He made no answer, gazing out across the plain far below them, mellowing richly in the ever-softening light of the sunset.

She looked doubtfully at his profile, rather lean, with the beginning already drawn of the deep American line from the Corner of the nose to the mouth, that is partly humorous and partly grim.  “Don’t you believe that, Neale, that we would have come together somehow, anyhow?” she asked, “even if you had gone straight back from Genoa to Ashley?  Maybe it might have been up there after you’d begun to run the mill.  Maybe I’d have gone back to America and gone up to visit Cousin Hetty again.”

He was still silent.

She said urgently, as if in alarm, “Neale, you don’t believe that we could have passed all our lives and never have seen each other?”