"I know a secret," she said, just above her breath, "worth two of that."
"You'll never be sorry—never?" he urged wistfully, resolutely denying himself the entire bliss of that answer.
"Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"
That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he whimsically remembered something else:
"You live in the king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And in New York—in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat."
"No," she cried, "no, indeed! Not 'perhaps,' I insist upon a flat." She looked about the room with its bench brought from the altar of a forgotten deity of dreams, with its line and colour dissolving to mirrored point and light—the mystic union of sight with dream—and she smiled at the divine incongruity and the divine resemblance. "It wouldn't be so very different—a flat," she said shyly.
Wouldn't it—wouldn't it, after all, be so very different?
"Ah, if you only think so, really," cried St. George.
"But it will be different, just different enough to like better," she admitted then. "You know that I think so," she said.
"If only you knew how much I think so," he told her, "how I have thought so, day and night, since that first minute at the Boris. Olivia, dear heart—when did you think so first—"