They found a secluded corner, and spent half an hour in perfect peace.  Hector was an artist in pleasing women—­and to-night, though he never once transgressed in words, she could feel through it all that he loved her—­loved her madly.  His voice was so tender and deep, and his thought for her slightest wish and comfort so evident; he was masterful, too, and settled what she was to do—­where to sit, and now and then he made her look at him.

He was just so wildly happy he could not stop to count the cost; and while he worshipped her more deeply than when they had sat on the soft greensward at Versailles, even the whole sight of her pure soul now could not stop him—­now he knew she loved him, and that there were possible others on the scene.  She had trusted him—­had appealed to his superior strength; he did not forget that fact quite—­but here at a ball was not the place to analyze what it would mean.  They were just two guests dancing and supping like the rest, and were supremely content.

He found out where she was going for Whitsuntide, but said nothing of his own intentions.

The blindness and madness of love was upon him and held him in complete bondage.  The first shock, which her look of the wounded fawn had given him, was over.  They had suffered, and made good resolutions, and parted, and now they had met again.  And he could not, and would not, think where they might drift to.

To be near her, to look into her eyes, to be conscious of her personality was what he asked at the moment, what he must have.  The rest of time was a blank, and meaningless.  It is not every man who loves in this way—­fortunately for the rest of the world!  Many go through life with now and then a different woman merely as an episode, as far as anything but a physical emotion is concerned.  Sport, or their own ambitions, fill up their real interests, and no woman could break their hearts.

But Hector was not of these.  And this woman had it in her power to make his heaven or hell.

They had both passed through moments of exalted sentiment, even a little dramatic in their tragedy and renunciation, but circumstance is stronger always than any highly strung emotion of good or evil.  At the end of their good-bye at Madrid their story should have closed, as the stories in books so often do, with the hero and heroine worked up to some wonderful pitch of self-sacrifice and drama.  They so seldom tell of the flatness of the afterwards.  The impossibility of retaining a balance on this high pinnacle of moral valor, where circumstance, which is a commonplace and often material thing, decrees that the lights shall not be turned out with the ring-down of the curtain.

Unless death finishes what is apparently the last act, there is always the to-morrow to be reckoned with—­out of the story-book.  So while exalted—­he by his sudden worship of that pure sweetness of soul in Theodora which he had discovered, she by her innocence and desire to do right—­they had been able to tune their minds to an idea of a tender good-bye, full of sentiment and vows of abstract devotion, and adherence to duty.