Nothing else could count—could matter. The human heart and human brain could not harbor meaner thoughts. She loved him. She was in his arms, therefore his arms circled the universe. Her breath was on his face, and life was good.
Then came the shock of realization. His sphinx rose before him—not a sphinx that kept the secrets of forty dead centuries, but one that held in cryptic silence all the future. He could not offer a love tainted with such peril without explaining how tainted it was. Now, he must tell her everything.
“I love you,” he found himself repeating over and over; “I love you.”
He heard her voice, through singing stars:
“I love you. I have never said that to anyone else—never until now. And,” she added proudly, “I shall never say it again—except to you.”
In his heart rose a torrent of rebellion. To tell her now—to poison her present moment, wonderful with the happiness of surrender—would be cruel, brutal. He, too, had the right to his hour of happiness, to a life of happiness! In the strength of his exaltation, it seemed to him that he could force fate to surrender his secret. He would settle things without making her a sharer in the knowledge that peril shadowed their love. He would find a way!
Standing there with her close to his heart, and her own palpitating against his breast, he felt more than a match for mere facts and conditions. It seemed ridiculous that he had allowed things to bar his way so long. Now, he was thrice armed, and must triumph!
“I know now why the world was made,” he declared, joyfully. “I know why all the other wonderful women and all the other wonderful loves from the beginning of time have been! It was,” he announced with the supreme egotism of the moment, “that I might compare them with this.”
And so the resolve to be silent was cast away, and after it went the sudden resolve to tell everything. Saxon, feeling only triumph, did not realize that he had, in one moment, lost his second and third battles.
An hour later, they strolled back together toward the house. Saxon was burdened with the canvas on which he had painted his masterpiece. They were silent, but walking on the milky way, their feet stirring nothing meaner than star-dust. On the verandah, Steele met them, and handed his friend a much-forwarded letter, addressed in care of the Louisville club where he had dined. It bore the stamp of a South American Republic.