"I wish it would never end," she returned, dreamily.
He smiled with the delight of a lover, that slow, sweet smile for which she had begun to watch with pleasure.
"You don't know what happiness your words give me when I remember that I have been your only companion," he said softly. "How beautiful you are as you lie there with that crimson glow just touching you! You are a tropical plant, Carlita, and should be grown in a tropical country. Warmth suits you. The bewildering delight of flaming colors make you like some superb bird of plumage. You will love Italy with a sort of savage delight, I fancy. You have never traveled?"
"No."
"What a world of pleasure there is in store for you, what almost rapture! Our own country, while beautiful, has none of the mythological and historical memories that make other countries a constant poem. One gets so weary of the newness and glitter of it all, just as we should have grown of that gorgeous old sun but for this Heaven-sent gloom. There is a greater element of romance in most of us than practical, particularly we who are removed from the sordid compulsion of living-getting. We want to fancy ourselves once in awhile as knights of the olden time, performing deeds of valor for our Helens of Troy. See! The sun is going out. He has illuminated the old brown shore to positive glory with his good-night kiss. Do you remember the sweet old poem of Percy Shelley?"
He leaned forward, with that beautiful smile in his eyes, and repeated it in his musical voice:
"'The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever,
With a sweet emotion.
Nothing in the world is single;
All things, by a law divine,
In one another's being mingle—
Why not I with thine?
"'See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What are all these kisses worth,
If thou kiss not me?"
He was looking down at her still with the smile in his eyes, the light of incalculable love, and she was looking up at him, totally unconscious of the expression upon her tremulous lips and in the depths of her beautiful eyes, totally unconscious of the wistful permission that expression contained.