'Oh, well,' he shrugged, 'I won't argue, with the poet and the priests both against me; but still----'
'You think that your speckled soul is exactly as good at other people's white souls?'
'It all depends,' he demurred, 'upon how they kept theirs white and how I got mine speckled.'
'Our frate has afforded a long moral,' she laughed.
'Ah--and I suspect he didn't deserve it. He looks, poor devil, as if his heart were still in the world, in spite of the fact that he himself is in the cloister.'
'In that case,' she returned, 'he's lost the world for nothing, for his prayers will not be answered unless his heart is in them.'
'There's a tragedy!' said Sybert--'to have lost the world, and then, in spite of it, to turn up in the end with a dusty soul!'
They looked at each other soberly, and then they both laughed.
'Philosophy is a queer thing,' said Marcia. 'You may go as far as you please, but you always end where you started.'
'"Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break on vain philosophy's aye-bubbling spring,"' he repeated softly, with his eyes on the fire; and then he leaned toward her and laughed again. 'Miss Marcia, do you know I have an idea?'
'It's about you and me--I have a theory that we might be pretty good friends.'
'I thought we'd been friends for some time,' she returned evasively. 'I am sure my uncle's friends are mine.'
'Really, I hadn't suspected it! But it's the same with friends as with politics and religion: they don't amount to much until you find them for yourself.'
'I should say,' he added, 'that we'd been pretty good enemies all this time. What do you say to our being friends, for a change?'
Marcia glanced away in a sudden spasm of shyness.
'Shall we try it?' he asked in a low tone, bending toward her and laying his hand palm upward on the arm of her chair.
She dropped her hand into his hesitatingly, and his fingers closed upon it. He looked at the fire a moment, and then back in her face.
'Marcia,' he said softly, 'did you ever hear the Tuscan proverb, "The foes of yesterday become the friends of to-day and the lovers of to-morrow"?'
A quick wave of colour swept over her face, and a faint answering flush appeared in his. She drew her hand away and rose to her feet, with a light laugh that put the last few minutes ages away.