Suddenly, looking up, she found her host before her.
“It has been quite impossible to get near you. I have sought you once as my guest, again as the very newest lady, and several times after that because I seem to have remembered you some place.”
Julie laughed. “Perhaps that all comes of my being so new. To-morrow I shall have dwindled back into proportion.”
“Come and take a walk on the gallery,” he invited; “I want to show you the wall.”
They passed through a doorway out to a high gallery that brought them suddenly very close to the stars. Julie faced them as astonished as if a corner of the sky had been unpinned.
“Do these belong to your garden?” she asked laughingly.
“To my Neighbor’s Country.” He smiled. “I don’t transgress.” He laid his hand on a dark line of stones. “Here are the walls. They keep the Pacific out of my estate.”
A stone’s throw over the walls Julie saw the purple stretches of the ocean that used to come gloriously rushing through her gate of golden dreams. She listened a moment to its roar rising above the music in the garden. Then she stared over the city. Before her, mysterious, shadowy, inexorable, the ancient ramparts rose, inclosing a black, fantastic city with unearthly towers and domes. A city of fate!
The girl shivered with mingled ecstasy and fear.
“Why do you live here? You might have chosen other cities.”