"Eh?" he said, "and what about that honor of yours? What shall we say about it, now that the sapphire's gone and no longer in our way?"
She was breathing quick to keep from crying. "I told you that day at the restaurant."
"Yes, yes; you told me why you kept the sapphire from me, but"--he hung fire, then fetched it out with an effort--"why did you take it in the first place?"
She looked at him in clear astonishment. "I didn't know what it was."
It seemed to Flora the whole situation was turning exactly inside out. The light that was breaking upon her was more than she could bear. "Oh," she wailed, "you couldn't have thought I meant to take it!"
"Then if you didn't," he burst out, "why, when I told you what it was, didn't you give it to me?"
The cruel comic muse, who makes our serious suffering ridiculous, had drawn aside the last curtain. Flora felt the laughter rising in her throat, the tears in her eyes.
"You guessed who I was," he insisted, advancing, "at least what I represented."
She hid her face in her hands, and her voice dropped, tiny, into the stillness.
The tallest eucalyptus top was all of the garden that was touched with sun when Flora came out of the house in the morning. She stood a space looking at that little cone of brightness far above all the other trees, swaying on the delicate sky. It was not higher lifted nor brighter burnished than her spirit then. Shorn of her locket chain, her golden pouch, free of her fears, she poised looking over the garden. Then with a leap she went from the veranda to the grass and, regardless of dew, skimmed the lawn for the fountain and the rose garden.
There she saw him--the one man--already awaiting her. He stood back to back with a mossy nymph languishing on her pedestal, and Flora hoped by running softly to steal up behind him, and make of the helpless marble lady a buffer between their greetings. But either she underestimated the nymph's bulk, or forgot how invariably direct was the man's attack; for turning and seeing her, without any circumvention, with one sweep of his long arm, he included the statue in his grasp of her. With a laugh of triumph he drew her out of her concealment.
To her the splendor of skies and trees and morning light melted into that wonderful moment. For the first time in weary days she had all to give, nothing to fear or withhold. She was at peace. She was ready to stop, to stand here in her life for always--here in the glowing garden with him, and their youth. But he was impatient. He did not want to loiter in the morning. He was hot to hurry on out of the present which was so mysterious, so untried to her, as if these ecstasies had no mystery to him but their complete fulfilment. He filled her with a trembling premonition of the undreamed-of things that were waiting for her in the long aisle of life.