"What is the cause?"
"You only do it because you are obliged to spend so much time indoors with me. You don't acknowledge it because you are so dear and sweet, but I know well enough all you have given up for me."
"Wait until we get to the Magical Island where it is always warm. We can be out there together all day long."
"Just you and I together?"
"Just you and I together," she repeated; "unless you want any one else."
"I want nothing and no one in the world but only you."
A little thrill ran through her at the thought of his utter dependence on her, for she was literally his whole world.
He stood, but for her, absolutely isolated, absolutely alone—the friends of his early life forgotten, wiped out as though they had never been; but what matter since it made him more entirely hers?
Each day brought Philippa its draught of Love's elixir, and she drank it lingeringly, unwilling to lose a drop. And in some curious way the potion wrought a change in her. She adopted a new personality. It was not that of Phil—the Phil she had undertaken to represent, for she would have had recollections of old days to linger over with him—but a new Phil, reborn in a wonderful present, with no past because he could not share it, and with a future veiled in half-fearful, wholly delicious mystery.
To-day, the glorious Now, was his and hers, they were together on the hill where Hope stands smiling, and if, somewhere below that dizzy altitude, there was a valley where Memory lurked, she could not see it for the rainbow clouds of joy that wrapped her round.