“Did I manifest it in the omnibus to poor Beattie and my guardian?” she asked, smiling, and in a lighter tone.

“I don’t know,” he said gravely.  “But when I saw you the same evening walking with your sister in the public garden I felt it more strongly.  Even the way you held your head and moved—­you reminded me of the maidens of the Porch on the Acropolis.  I connected you with Greece and all my—­my dreams of Greece.”

“Perhaps if you hadn’t just come from Greece—­”

“Wasn’t it strange,” he said, interrupting her but quite unconscious that he did so, “that almost the first words I heard you speak were about Greece?  You were telling your sister abut the Greek divers who come to Portofino to find coral under the sea.  I was sitting alone in the garden, and you passed and I heard just a few words.  They made me think of the first Greek Island I ever saw, rising out of the sunset as I voyaged from Constantinople to the Piraeus.  It was wonderfully beautiful and wonderfully calm.  It was like a herald of all the beauty and purity I found in Greece.  It was—­like you.”

“How you hated Constantinople!” she said.  “I remember you denouncing its noise and its dirt, and the mongrel horrors of Pera, to my guardian in the hotel where we made friends.  And he put in a plea for Stamboul.”

“Yes, I exaggerated.  But Constantinople stood to me for all the uproar of life, and Greece for the calm and beauty and happiness, the great Sanity of the true happiness.”

He looked at her with yearning in his dark eyes.

“For all I want in my own life,” he added.

He paused; then an expression of strong, almost hard resolution made his face look suddenly older.

“You told me at Burstal, on the Chilton Downs, after your debut in ‘Elijah,’ that you would give me an answer soon.  I have waited a good while—­some weeks——­”

“Why did you ask me just that day, after ’Woe unto them’?”

“I felt I must,” he answered, but with a slight awkwardness, as if he were evading something and felt half-guilty.  “To-day I decided I would ask you again, for the last time.”

“You would never——­”

“No, never.  If you say ‘Wait, and come later on and ask me,’ I shall not come.”

She got up restlessly.  She was obviously moved.

“Dion, I can’t tell you to-day.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.  I just feel I can’t.  It’s no use.”

“When did you mean to tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you mean ever to allude to the matter again, if I hadn’t?”

“Yes, I should have told you, because I knew you were waiting. 
I—­I—­often I have thought that I shall never marry any one.”

She looked into the fire.  Her face had become almost mysterious.

“Some women don’t need—­that,” she murmured.

The fire played over her pale yellow hair.

“Abnormal women!” he exclaimed violently.