It's the Beginning." "It is the world," she whispered vaguely.
"Yes, yes--" Words burst from his lips beyond his power to control.
"It is Eden, it is Paradise, but a vacant Eden, a Paradise incomplete.
Constance--" The girl felt herself shiver at this sound of a voice which all too often these past five years had come to her unbidden when she found moments of self-communion in her own restless and dissatisfied life.
Walls had not shut it out, music had not drowned it, gayety had not served to banish it.

She had heard it in her subjective soul ofttimes when the shadows fell and the firelight flickered.

Now, beneath a limitless sky, under a strange radiance, in a wild primeval world--in this Eden which they two alone occupied--she heard him, the man whom in her heart she loved, speaking to her once more in very person, and speaking that very thought which was in her own heart that hour.

Her bosom rose tumultuously, her throat fluttered.

Instinctively she would have fled, but a hand on her shoulder pressed her back as she would have arisen, and she obeyed--as she had always obeyed him--as she always would.
"Paradise unfinished--" he whispered, his face close to hers.