"The object of my walk has been accomplished," said John.
"Oh?" questioned she.
"I was walking in the hope, on the chance, that I might meet you," he hardily explained. "It's such an age since I've seen you. Are you making for the garden? I pray you to be kind, and let me go with you. I've been an exile and a wanderer—I've been to Roccadoro."
She had rebegun her ascension of the hill. The path was steep, as well as rugged. Sometimes John had to help her over a hard bit. The touch of her hand, soft and warm, and firm too, in his; the sense of her closeness; the faint fragrance of her garments, of her hair,—these things, you may be sure, went to his head, went to his heart. The garden lay in a white blaze of sunshine, that seemed almost material, like an incandescent fluid; but the entrance to the avenue was dark and inviting. "Let us," he proposed, "go and sit on a marble bench under the glossy leaves of the ilexes, in the deep, cool shade; and let's play that it's a thousand years ago, and that you're a Queen (white Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies), and that I'm your minstrel-man."
"What song will you sing me?" asked she gaily, as they took their places on the marble bench. It was semicircular, with a high carved back, (carved with the armorials of the Sforzas), and of course it was lichen-stained, grey and blue and green, yellow and scarlet.
"White Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies,
Fairer and dearer than dearest and fairest,
To hear me sing, if it her sweet will is,—
Sing, minstrel-man, of thy love, an thou darest,"
trolled John, in his light barytone, to a tune, I imagine, improvised for the occasion. "But if it's a thousand years ago," he laughed, "that song smacks too much perhaps of actuality, and I had best choose another."
Maria Dolores joined in his laugh. "I did not know you sang," she said. "Let me hear the other."
"A song," reflected he, "that I could sing with a good deal of feeling and conviction, would be 'Give her but the least excuse to love me.'"
Maria Dolores all at once looked sober.