And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm of retroactive terror.  At the same time he was filled with a kind of exultancy.  All that he had hoped had come to pass, and more, vastly more.  Not only had he been received as a friend at Ventirose, but he had been encouraged to tell her a part at least of the story by which her life and his were so curiously connected; and he had been snatched from the peril of telling her too much.  The day was not yet when he could safely say, “Mutato nomine. . . . .”  Would the day ever be?  But, meanwhile, just to have told her the first ten lines of that story, he could not help feeling, somehow advanced matters tremendously, somehow put a new face on matters.

“The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as you think,” he said to Marietta.  “The curtain has risen upon Act Three.  I fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the beginning of the end.”

XIX

All that evening, something which he had not been conscious of noticing especially when it was present to him—­certainly he had paid no conscious attention to its details—­kept recurring and recurring to Peter’s memory:  the appearance of the prettily-arranged terrace-end at Ventirose:  the white awning, with the blue sky at its edges, the sunny park beyond; the warm-hued carpets on the marble pavement; the wicker chairs, with their bright cushions; the table, with its books and bibelots—­the yellow French books, a tortoise-shell paperknife, a silver paperweight, a crystal smelling-bottle, a bowlful of drooping poppies; and the marble balustrade, with its delicate tracery of leaves and tendrils, where the jessamine twined round its pillars.

This kept recurring, recurring, vividly, a picture that he could see without closing his eyes, a picture with a very decided sentiment.  Like the gay and gleaming many-pinnacled facade of her house, it seemed appropriate to her; it seemed in its fashion to express her.  Nay, it seemed to do more.  It was a corner of her every-day environment; these things were the companions, the witnesses, of moments of her life, phases of herself, which were hidden from Peter; they were the companions and witnesses of her solitude, her privacy; they were her confidants, in a way.  They seemed not merely to express her, therefore, but to be continually on the point—­I had almost said of betraying her.  At all events, if he could only understand their silent language, they would prove rich in precious revelations.  So he welcomed their recurrences, dwelt upon them, pondered them, and got a deep if somewhat inarticulate pleasure from them.