“It is,” she said. “Have I not a beautiful altar to worship at?”
He understood:
“This view? the green dale of quietude, with all its lovely secrets. I like best, Madonna, the lilies of your altar-piece.”
“Ah, if one could but see them!”
“It is enough to know they are there, as I know the love that is in your heart. It is sweet, I think, in hiding. But some day it will be sweeter to go down and drown among my lilies. Is the basil in bud yet?”
“Not yet.”
She called him by the name it was only hers to know. He sighed.
“It is shyer than these myrtles. Why did we not make them the symbol of our bridal? They have the better right. I wonder what it waits for?—my life’s blood, perhaps, Aquaviva would say.”
She cried “Bonbec!” and looked at him with such a white piteousness that his heart smote him.
“Beloved,” he whispered: “That was a senseless and a wicked thought. Forgive me for it. But I wish the basil would blossom. Where do you keep it—in that same dear bower?”