Standing beside the table, she leaned her cheek for a moment upon the roses in the Venetian vase; and it seemed to her, as the petals brushed her face, that she felt again his eager kisses fall on her eyes and throat. The memory sent her blood beating to her pulses; and she saw his face in her thoughts as she had seen it on that afternoon, transfigured and intensified by the peculiar vividness of her perceptions.
"There has been nothing like this in my life before," he had said in a passion of sincerity, "there has been nothing in my life but you from the beginning." The irony was gone then from his voice; she had found no hint of even the satirical humour in his eyes; and as she remembered this now it seemed to her that she had there for the first time—for the one and only moment since she had known him—succeeded in holding by her touch that deeper chord of his nature for which she had always felt herself to be instinctively groping.
She was still brooding over the rapture of yesterday, when the door opened quickly and Kemper came in with the eager haste in which he appeared to live every instant of his life. At the first glance she saw that the ardour of the last afternoon was still in his eyes, and the next moment she found herself yielding to his impatient kisses.
"I was trying to decide whether I love you more when you are with me or when you are away," she said with a joyful laugh.
"Well, as for me, I love you exactly a hundred times more when I see you," he retorted gayly.
His words seemed, as she repeated them, an affront to her insatiable desire for the perfection of love.
"Then if you never saw me again you would be able to forget me?" she asked a little wounded.
He laughed easily with a quick return to his pleasant banter, "I hope so. What's the use of loving when nothing comes of it?"
When nothing comes of it! A cloud dimmed the radiant clearness of her morning; then she met the strong tenderness in his eyes, and with an effort, she thrust her disappointment aside, as she had thrust it aside at every meeting since the beginning of her love.
"I have always wondered if happiness were as happy as people thought," she said gravely, "and now I know, I know."