"Then may we never be sane!"
"I—you have known me only two days! What—"
"Ah, no! I've known you all these years and have been loving you without really knowing it. I made a woman out of my own fancy, that I dreamed alive. In the long winter evenings when I worked at my models in the little house in Aoyama, I used to see her face in my driftwood blaze and talk to her. I called her my 'Lady of the Many-Colored Fires.' I never thought she really existed, but that first night in the Embassy garden I knew that my dream-woman was you!—you, Barbara!"
Her hands pushed him from her no more. They fell to trembling on his breast. In the dense, salty obscurity, she turned her head sharply, to feel again his lips on hers, her own molding to his kiss. She drooped, swaying, stunned, breathless.
"Barbara, I love you!"
"No—not again. Light—the candle."
"Just a moment longer—here in the dark, with Ben-ten. It's fate, darling! Why should I have been in Japan and not in Persia when you came? Why did I happen to be there in the garden that night, at that particular moment? Why, it was the purest accident that I came here to-day! No—not accident. It was kismet! Barbara!"
His lips were murmuring against her cheek. "Say 'I love you,' too!"
"I—can not. You ... you would hold me cheap ... I would be—I am!... What? Yes, it was a tulip tree. I was sixteen.... Oh, you couldn't have—why, you'd forgotten the whole thing! You had, you had!... Don't hold me.... No, I don't care what you think!... Yes, I do care!... Yes, I—I ... This is perfectly shameless!... Dark? That makes it all the worse. What will you ... No, no! You must not kiss me again! We must go back!—I will go back...."