“Not a soul,” said he.
A tragic pause followed this forlorn declaration. “Dear Belovedest,” said Stella, very seriously, “I do wish I could come and set it right for you.”
Their eyes met. John sighed.
“I wish you could,” said he. “There 's a fairy wand standing in the corner which no one but you can touch. It gives every one else an electric shock that sends them head over heels. But if you could get it and wave it about the place, you would make all sorts of dead things come to glorious life, and fill all the garden walks with flowers, and make the waters live again in the fountains.”
It was the John Risca whom she had always known that spoke, the John Risca of whom Herold had occasional flashes, so that he could discount his usual gloomy petulance and love the essential man, the John Risca whose hand poor dumb, little Unity Blake had laid against her cheek—the best and purest John Risca, a will-o'-the-wisp gleam to all his nearest save Stellamaris; but to Stellamaris just the ordinary, commonplace, unaltering, and unalterable John Risca, the Great High Belovedest of her earliest memories. He had said things like this a hundred thousand times before. Yet now the colour rose once more into her cheeks, and a mist such as might surround a dewdrop veiled her eyes.
“What makes you think I could do all that for you?” she asked.
“I don't know, my dear,” said John. “You seem to belong to another world.” He stumbled. “You 're just a fairy sort of creature.”
The answer did not satisfy the instinctive innermost whence sprang the question; but it served. Woman since the beginning of things has had to content herself with half-answers from man, seeing that she vouchsafes him scarcely any answers at all. She smiled and stretched out her hand. John took it in his clumsy fingers. It was whiter than any hand in the world, veined with the faintest of faint blue.
“Anyhow,” she said, “you ought n't to have neglected the palace.”
“What was I to do?” he asked whimsically. “You 've been so busy growing up that you've had no time to help me to run it.”