It seemed a long time, as long as whole years, since she had meant to drop another rose in his path, or even since she had suffered him to press her hand for a moment.  The whole tale was told now, in one touch, in one look, with little resistance and less fear.

“I love you,” he said slowly and earnestly, and the words were strange to his own ears.

For he had never said them before, nor had she ever heard them, and when they are spoken in that way they are the most wonderful words in the world, both to speak and to hear.

The look he had so rarely seen was there now, and there was no care to hide what was in her eyes, for she had told him all, without a word, as women can.

“I have loved you very long,” he said again, and with one hand he pressed back her hair and smoothed it.

“I know it,” she answered, gazing at him with lips just parted.  “But I have loved you longer still.”

“How could I guess it?” he asked.  “It seems so wonderful, so very strange!”

“I could not say it first.”  She smiled.  “And yet I tried to tell you without words.”

“Did you?”

She nodded as her head lay in his arm, and closed her smiling lips tightly, and nodded again.

“You would not understand,” she said.  “You always made it hard for me.”

“Oh, if I had only known!”

She lay quietly on his arm for a few seconds, and neither spoke.  Only the low roar of the furnace was heard in the hot stillness.  Marietta looked up steadily into his face, with unwinking eyes.

“How you look at me!” he said, with a happy smile.

“I have often wanted to look at you like this,” she answered gravely.  “But until you had told me, how could I?”

He bent down rather timidly, but drawn to her by a power he could not resist.  His first kiss touched her forehead lightly, with a sort of boyish reverence, while a thrill ran through every nerve and fibre of his body.  But she turned in his arms and threw her own suddenly round his neck, and in an instant their lips met.

Zorzi was in a dream, where Marietta alone was real.  All thought and recollection of danger vanished, the very room was not the laboratory where he had so long lived and worked, and thought and suffered.  The walls were gold, the stone pavement was a silken carpet, the shadowy smoke-stained beams were the carved ceiling of a palace, he was himself the king and master of the whole world, and he held all his kingdom in his arms.

“You understand now,” Marietta said at last, holding his face before her with her hands.

“No,” he answered lovingly.  “I do not understand, I will not even try.  If I do, I shall open my eyes, and it will suddenly be daylight, and I shall put out my hands and find nothing!  I shall be alone, in my room, just awake and aching with a horrible longing for the impossible.  You do not know what it is to dream of you, and wake in the grey dawn!  You cannot guess what the emptiness is, the loneliness!”