"We might have seen it together if you had been there," he said. "There is no secret I could see that you couldn't see."
"No," she said, rather sadly. "You have always lived in this beautiful place, and you have seen nothing that isn't beautiful—all your life. Of course you could see that, because there was nothing to get in the way. But it isn't at all beautiful where I live. I have seen so many ugly things all round me."
"It must always be beautiful where you live—Viola."
He spoke her name caressingly. It was the first time he had uttered it, except impersonally, and it made a new sweet contact between them.
She smiled at him. "Perhaps if you love beautiful things, and think about them," she said, "it doesn't so much matter if you can't always have them about you. Do you think I could really see the fairies, if I were with you?"
He thought for a moment, with a slight frown on his face, which made the words that should come out of his thought of great importance to her. It was not in him to say something just to please her. The lightest thing that he might say to her would come from the depths of the unspoilt spirit that was in him.
His face cleared, and he looked up at her again. "I think that when you are very young you may see something like that," he said, "—or, by chance, when you are older. It means something very important, or else it doesn't mean much. It meant something very important to me to see them, but now it's not so important. If I had never seen it I should have seen you, and it would have been just the same."
"Why would it have been just the same?"
She was fascinated anew. Did ever a girl have such incense as this burned before her? And it was incense lit from a flame in the heart, not from a spark on the tongue. Her nostrils were eager for the fume of it.
Again the little considering frown. "It would," he said, "I know it would. It all meant you, somehow, though I have never seen you until now. There was something wanting in it all the time; and it was you. I should never look at anything now, and think how beautiful it was, without thinking of you."