"I could not say it first." She smiled. "And yet I tried to tell you without words."
"Did you?"
She nodded as her head lay in his arm, and closed her smiling lips tightly, and nodded again.
"You would not understand," she said. "You always made it hard for me."
"Oh, if I had only known!"
She lay quietly on his arm for a few seconds, and neither spoke. Only the low roar of the furnace was heard in the hot stillness. Marietta looked up steadily into his face, with unwinking eyes.
"How you look at me!" he said, with a happy smile.
"I have often wanted to look at you like this," she answered gravely. "But until you had told me, how could I?"
He bent down rather timidly, but drawn to her by a power he could not resist. His first kiss touched her forehead lightly, with a sort of boyish reverence, while a thrill ran through every nerve and fibre of his body. But she turned in his arms and threw her own suddenly round his neck, and in an instant their lips met.
Zorzi was in a dream, where Marietta alone was real. All thought and recollection of danger vanished, the very room was not the laboratory where he had so long lived and worked, and thought and suffered. The walls were gold, the stone pavement was a silken carpet, the shadowy smoke-stained beams were the carved ceiling of a palace, he was himself the king and master of the whole world, and he held all his kingdom in his arms.