"She will come! She must come!" he muttered, and kept himself awake with that.
And she did come. After untold hours of waiting, during which he alternately dozed and started into uneasy watchfulness through sheer force of will, she came to him out of the scented darkness, walking slowly, with hands hanging straight at her sides, a slim figure dimly white. So suddenly did she appear that at first he did not move, believing himself still drowsing. But she stopped before him; and at once the world fell away from him, leaving him thought and memory of nothing but that she had come to him at his call and that they were alone together.
"I am here," she said, very low. "Didst call me, or did I dream it? And why?"
"Because I wanted thee!" he answered, and caught her hands and kissed them. His own hands shook as he drew her down upon the bench beside him; he dared not trust his voice to utter what was on his tongue. She sat beside him, leaving her hands in one of his, and he slipped his arm about her, unrebuked. In the darkness he could not tell whether or not her eyes were on him. Presently she spoke.
"Hast thou not a tale to tell to-night? Last night thou didst not come, and I was lonely. All the night I did not sleep. Now I am tired—so tired...."
Her voice drifted into silence. She yawned, quite openly, like a sleepy child, and leaned her head slowly back against his arm. Nicanor quivered from head to foot, and tightened his clasp about her. It was these innocent tricks of hers, these child ways, wholly trusting, without thought of guile, that made him mad for her, tempted him almost beyond endurance, and yet, in their very innocence, made themselves her strongest shield. She knew nothing, with that child's soul of hers, of the passion which shook him at her touch, which sent his hands hot when her fingers fluttered into his, and set his heart pounding in heavy throbs when, as now, she leaned her cheek above it. How should she know? Her mind was a child's mind, unawakened, even though her body was a woman's body, fragrant cup of the mystic wine of life, abounding in sweet allurements of which she knew not the smallest meaning.
"I would have another tale!" she said at length, imperiously, and raised her head to look at him in grieved surprise that her command should be so slighted. But Nicanor drew her back to him, lifting both her cool palms to his burning face.
"Ah, lady mine!" he said, "the only tale I have to tell thee, I may not utter. None other have I to-night; my heart is big with it, my brain reels with it, but my lips must e'en be dumb. And yet—I know that thou wouldst listen; that what I might say would echo in thy heart forever and a day. Then why should I not say it? Why, if the thorns be not strong enough to guard, should I not pluck the rose?"
He gathered her more closely into his arms, drinking the perfume of her hair, the warmth of her, into every fibre of his being. She lay quiet, her head thrown back against his shoulder, great eyes wide open in the darkness, resting easily as a bird in its nest against his strength.
"Because the rose is too fair and fragrant for common hands to pluck." Nicanor's voice grew to a hushed intensity, as though he argued with himself a point gone over many times before, yet never wholly gained—what higher manhood there was in him contending with temptation innocently offered, striving against lawless passion and desire. "Now it is but a half-blown bud, this rose, knowing nothing of the perils which beset all roses in all gardens, lady mine, hiding the golden heart of it in shy, half-open leaves. Some day a high-born stranger will enter the garden, and the gardener will point to this his rose, and say: 'Look you, friend, at the fair flower I have nurtured here. I have tended it well, kept from it frost and blasting heat, watered it, let the sun to shine upon it. Now it is ready for the plucking—take you it.' Then the stranger will pluck the rose, and will watch it unfold, petal by petal, until all the beauty of it is laid bare. And gardener nor stranger will ever know that one was in the garden there before them, with his hand upon the rose's stem and his breath upon the rose's heart."