But presently he brought himself back to facts again.
"Darling," he said, "I will find out exactly how everything can be managed, and then you will meet me here, under this tree, and we will go away together and be married, and for a week at least I will make the time to stay with you, as your lover, and you shall be absolutely and truly my sweetest wife."
"Yes," said Halcyone, perfectly content.
"And after that," he went on, "I will arrange that you stay somewhere near me, so that every moment that I am free I can come back to the loving glory of your arms."
"I cannot think of any other heaven," the tender creature murmured. And then she nestled closer, and her voice became dreamy.
"This is what God means in everything," she whispered. "In the Springtime, which is waiting for the Summer—in all the flowers and all the trees. This is the secret the night has taught me from the very beginning, when I first was able to spend the hours in her arms."
Then this mystery of her knowledge of the night he had to probe; and she told him, in old-world, romantic language, how she had discovered the stairs and Aphrodite, and even of the iron-bound box which she had never been able to move.
"It contains some papers of that Sir Timothy, I expect," she said. "We know by the date of the breastplate that it was when Cromwell sent his Ironsides to search La Sarthe that he must have escaped through the door and got to the coast; but he was drowned crossing to France, so no one guessed or ever knew how he had got away—and I expect the secret of the passage died with him, and I was the first one to find it."
"Then what do you make of the goddess's head?" asked John Derringham. "Was that his, too?"
"Yes, I suppose so," she answered. "He was a great, grand seigneur—we know of that—and had traveled much in Italy when a young man, and stayed at Florence especially. He married a relative of the Medici belonging to some female branch, and he is even said to have been to Greece; but in the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany he would certainly have learned to appreciate the divine beauty of Aphrodite. He must have brought her from there as well as the Hebe and Artemis, which are not nearly so good. They stand in the hall—but they say nothing to me."