lived in such immortal blindness to the terror and foulness of the world. He came to her, like a creature who had travelled its life through dark space, for a moment of peace and conviction on some lonely planet, where now he stood, in the vast enchanted plain of moonlight, with moonlight falling on the moonflower of her face. For if a man should dream of heaven and, waking, find within his hand a flower as token that he had really been there—what then, what then?
“Eugene,” she said presently, “how old are you?”
His vision thickened with his pulse. In a moment he answered with terrible difficulty.
“I’m—just sixteen.”
“Oh, you child!” she cried. “I thought you were more than that!”
“I’m—old for my age,” he muttered. “How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-one,” she said. “Isn’t it a pity?”
“There’s not much difference,” he said. “I can’t see that it matters.”
“Oh, my dear,” she said. “It does! It matters so much!”
And he knew that it did—how much he did not know. But he had his moment. He was not afraid of pain, he was not afraid of loss. He cared nothing for the practical need of the world. He dared to say the strange and marvellous thing that had bloomed so darkly in him.
“Laura,” he said, hearing his low voice sound over the great plain of the moon, “let’s always love each other as we do now. Let’s never get married. I want you to wait for me and to love me forever. I am going all over the world. I shall go away for years at a time; I shall become famous, but I shall always come back to you. You shall live in a house away in the mountains, you shall wait for me, and keep yourself for me. Will you?” he said, asking for her life as calmly as for an hour of her time.
“Yes, dear,” said Laura in the moonlight, “I will wait for you forever.”
She was buried in his flesh. She throbbed in the beat of his pulses. She was wine in his blood, a music in his heart.
