"And yet," he said wistfully, "there is so little that I know of you during those years; there is so much for you to tell me."
"It seems nothing now," she answered, breaking the silence of a few moments. "I do not seem to have really lived until the last few days—the rest was only playing, and not worth recounting."
"Ah—but you are wrong. It is because it was your life that I want to hear it."
Natalia looked at him quickly and saw only his kind, glowing eyes bent on her.
"And since I have suffered," she continued slowly, "it seems to me those years of my life taught me so little how to know life."
"They taught you to love," Sargent answered quietly. "Don't you count that as a great deal?"
"Yes,—but I—" she stopped abruptly. It was on her lips to say she had known that as a little girl, and in the knowledge that she could not say it to him, came to her the first feeling of restraint.
"That is all one need learn to be happy," he continued, as if unaware of the interruption. "It is the centre about which the world is circling—at least the part of the world that is worthiest. Tell me about yourself and Morgan, Natalia. Tell me as you used to, when we would sit out here after school hours, I forgetting that I was a teacher, and you, that you were a little girl. I wonder if you have forgotten the lines about 'books in brooks.'"
As if in reply she leaned a little forward and looked up before her into the starlit sky, quoting softly:
"And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."