"Can"t we get up into the sunlight?" Michael proposed.
For all the sparkling airs above them, it was chilly enough down here, and they were glad to scramble up through thickets of holm-oak, arbutus, and aromatic scrub to a gra.s.sy peak in the sun"s eye. Here not even the buzzing of an insect broke the warm, wintry peace of the South, and it was hard to think that the restless continent of Asia was lapped by that tender and placid sea below. The dark, blue wavy line of Imbros and the dove-gray bulk of Lemnos were the only islands in sight, though, like lines of cloud upon the horizon, they could fancy the cliffs of Gallipoli and hear, so breathless was the calm, the faint grumbling of the guns.
"It was in Samothrace they set up the Winged Victory," Michael said.
Then suddenly he turned to Sylvia and took her hand. "My dear, when I dragged you up the beach yesterday I thought you were dead, and I cursed myself for a coward because I had let you die without telling you.
Sylvia, this adventure of ours, need it ever stop?"
"Everything comes to an end," she sighed.
"Except one thing--and that sets all the rest going again."
"What is your magic key?"
"Sylvia, I"m afraid to ask you to marry me, but will you?"
She stared at him; then she saw his eyes, and for a long while she was crying in his arms with happiness.
"My dear, my dear, you"ve lost your yellow shawl in the wreck."
"The mermaids can have it," she murmured. "I shall wrap up the rest of my memories in you."
Then she stopped in sudden affright.
"But, Michael, how can I marry you? I haven"t told you anything really about myself."
"Foolish one, you"ve told me everything that matters in these two months of the most perfect companionship possible for human beings."
"Companionship?" she echoed, looking at him fiercely. "And cousinship, eh?"
"No, no, my dear, you can"t frighten me any longer," he laughed.
"Surely, telling things belongs to the companionship of a life together--love has no words except when one is still very young and eloquent."
"But, Michael," she went on, "all these nine years of mystical speculation, are they going to end in the commonplace of marriage?"
"It won"t be commonplace, and besides, the war isn"t over yet, and after the war there will be an empty world to fill with all we have learned.
Ah, how poor old Guy would have loved to fill it with his Spanish castles."
"It seems wrong for us two up here to be so happy," Sylvia sighed.
"This is just a halcyon day, but there will soon be stormy days again."
"You mean you"ll go back now to--" She stopped in a desperate apprehension. "But, of course, we can"t live forever in these days of war between a blue sky and a blue sea. Yet, somehow, oh, my dearest and dearest, I don"t believe I shall lose _you_."
Like birds calling to one another, in the green thickets far away two bells tinkled their monotone; and a small gray craft flying the white ensign glided over the charmed sea toward Samothrace.
THE END