"The years!" she whispered to herself.
"It seems forever," said he. "The time when a fellow's taking his medicine always seems long, I reckon, I have almost forgotten my life of five years ago—almost, except a part of it. It's been another world here. Nothing matters much, does it?"
Whether there was now bitterness or softness in his speech she could not tell, but she found no reproach for herself in word or tone.
"Look," said she at length, pointing down at the valley of Heart's Desire, now bathed in the full flood of the unveiled moonlight. "Look! It is unspeakable."
He looked at her face instead. "I've seen you right here," he said, "right at this very place, a thousand times. It's Eden. It's the Garden. It's the Beginning."
"It is the world," she whispered vaguely.
"Yes, yes—" Words burst from his lips beyond his power to control. "It is Eden, it is Paradise, but a vacant Eden, a Paradise incomplete. Constance—"
The girl felt herself shiver at this sound of a voice which all too often these past five years had come to her unbidden when she found moments of self-communion in her own restless and dissatisfied life. Walls had not shut it out, music had not drowned it, gayety had not served to banish it. She had heard it in her subjective soul ofttimes when the shadows fell and the firelight flickered. Now, beneath a limitless sky, under a strange radiance, in a wild primeval world—in this Eden which they two alone occupied—she heard him, the man whom in her heart she loved, speaking to her once more in very person, and speaking that very thought which was in her own heart that hour. Her bosom rose tumultuously, her throat fluttered. Instinctively she would have fled, but a hand on her shoulder pressed her back as she would have arisen, and she obeyed—as she had always obeyed him—as she always would.
"Paradise unfinished—" he whispered, his face close to hers. "You know what it is that's missing."
Ah! could not a woman also know the longing, the vacancy, the solitude of an Eden incomplete! She turned to him trembling, her lips half open, as though to welcome a long-hoped-for draught of happiness.