“She was ashamed,” said Carlotta in a low voice, “because she loved some one afterwards, one of the gods, who would not look at her because she had given herself to a mortal.  A woman then has a fire here”—­she clasped her hands to her bosom—­“and wishes she could burn away to nothing, nothing, just to air, and become invisible.”

She was rising hurriedly on the last word, but I brought my hands down on her shoulders.

“Carlotta, my child,” said I, “what do you mean?”

She seized my wrists and struggling to rise, panted out in desperation: 

“You are one of the gods, and I wish I were changed into an invisible star.”

“I don’t,” said I, huskily.

By main force I drew her to me and our lips met.  She yielded, and this time the whole soul of Carlotta came to me in the kiss.

“It’s beautiful to snuggle up against you again,” said my ever direct Carlotta, after a while.  “I haven’t done it—­oh, for such a long time.”  She sighed contentedly.  “Seer Marcous—­”

" You must call me Marcus now,” said I, somewhat fatuously.

She shook her head as it lay on my shoulder.  “No.  You are Marcus —­or Sir Marcus—­to everybody.  To me you are always Seer Marcous.  Seer Marcous, darling,” she half whispered after a pause.  “Once I did not know the difference between a god and a mortal.  It was only that morning when I woke up—­”

“You took me for a saint in a dressing-gown,” said I.

“It’s the same thing,” she retorted.  And then taking up her parable, she told me in her artless way the inner history of her heart since that morning; but what she said is sacred.  Also, a man feels himself to be a pitiful dog of a god when a woman relates how she came to establish him on her High Altar.

Later we struck a lighter vein and spoke of the present, the enchantment of the hour, the scented air, the African stars.

“It seems, my dear,” said I, “that we have got to Nephelococcygia after all.”

“What is Nephelococcygia?” asked Carlotta.

I relented.  “It’s a base Aristophanic libel on our dream-city,” said I.

Thus out of evil has come good; out of pain has grown happiness; out of horror has sprung an everlasting love.  Many a man will say that in all my relations with Carlotta I have comported myself as a fool, and that my marriage is the crowning folly.  Well, I pretend not unto wisdom.  Wisdom would have married me to five thousand a year, a position in fashionable society, my Cousin Dora and premature old age antecedent to eternal destruction.  I hold that my salvation has lain the way of folly.  Again, it may be urged against me that I have squandered my life, that with all my learning, such as it is, I have achieved nothing.  I once thought so.  I boasted of it in my diary when I complacently styled myself a waster in Earth’s factory.  Oh, that diary!  Let me here solemnly retract and abjure every crude and idiot opinion and reflection of life set forth in that frenetic record!  I regard myself not as a waster—­I remember a passage in Epictetus treating of the ways of Providence: