“Henry—­I can’t help it—!” she gasped.  “It breaks my heart to see you so cold and white and numb—­I want to warm and comfort and love you back to life again——!”

At this minute, the sun burst through the scudding clouds, and blazed in upon them from the archway; and it seemed to Henry as if a new vitality rushed into his frozen veins.  She was so human and pretty, and young and real.  Love for him spoke from her sparkling, brown eyes.  The ascendancy she had obtained over him on the previous evening returned in a measure; he no longer wanted to get away from her and be alone.

He made some murmuring reply, and did not seek to draw away his hands—­but a sudden change of feeling seemed to come over Moravia for she lowered her head and a deep, pink flush grew in her cheeks.

“What will you think of me, Henry?” she whispered, pulling at his grasp, which grew firmer as she tried to loosen it.  “I”—­and then she raised her eyes, which were suffused with tears.  “Oh! it seems such horrid waste for you to be sick with grief for Sabine, who is happy now—­and that only I must grieve——­”

Girolamo had seen his nurse entering the far gate and was racing off to meet her, so that they were quite alone in the pavilion now, and Moravia’s words and the tears in her fond eyes had a tremendous effect upon Henry.  It moved some unknown cloud in his emotions.  She, too, wanted comfort, not he alone—­and he could bring it to her and be soothed in return, so he drew her closer and closer to him, and framed her face in his hands.

“Moravia,” he said, tenderly.  “You shall not grieve, dear child—­If you want me, take me, and I will give you all the devotion of true friendship—­and, who knows, perhaps we shall find the Indian summer, after all, now that the gates of my fool’s paradise are shut.”

In the abstract, it was not highly gratifying to a woman’s vanity, this declaration! but, as a matter of fact, it was beyond Moravia’s wildest hopes.  She had not a single doubt in her astute American mind that, once she should have the right to the society of Henry—­with her knowledge of the ways of man—­that she would soon be able to obliterate all regrets for Sabine, and draw his affections completely to herself.

At this juncture, she showed a stroke of genius.

“Henry,” she said, her voice vibrating with profound feeling, “I do want you—­more than anything I have ever wanted in my life—­and I will make you forget all your hurts—­in my arms.”

There was certainly nothing left for Lord Fordyce, being a gallant gentleman, to do but to stoop his tall head and kiss her—­and, to his surprise, he found this duty turn into a pleasure—­so that, in a few moments, when they were close together looking out upon the waves through the pavilion’s wide windows, he encircled her with his arm—­and then he burst into a laugh, but though it was cynical, it contained no bitterness.

“Moravia—­you are a witch,” he told her.  “Here is a situation that, described, would read like pathos—­and yet it has made us both happy.  Half an hour ago, I was wishing I might step over into that foam—­and now——­”