t for a night and a day in the quiet of
the High Alps. But only now had they been opened wide. Only to-night had
she passed through and looked forth with an unhindered vision upon the
world; and she discovered it to be a place of wonders and sweet magic.

"They were true, then," she said, with a smile on her lips.

"Of what do you speak?" asked Chayne.

"My dreams," Sylvia answered, knowing that she was justified of them.
"For I have come awake into the land of my dreams, and I know it at last
to be a real land, even to the sound of running water."

For from the hollow at her feet the music of the mill stream rose to her
ears through the still night, very clear and with a murmur of laughter.
Sylvia looked down toward it. She saw it flashing like a riband of silver
in the garden of the dark quiet house. There was no breath of wind in
that garden, and all the great trees were still. She saw the intricate
pattern of their boughs traced upon the lawn in black and silver.

"In that house I was born," she said softly, "to the noise of that
stream. I am very glad to know that in that house, too, my great
happiness has come to me."

Chayne leaned forward, and sitting side by side with Sylvia, gazed down
upon it with rapture. Oh, wonderful house where Sylvia was born! How much
the world owed to it!

"It was there!" he said with awe.

"Yes," replied Sylvia. She was not without a proper opinion of herself,
and it seemed rather a wonderful house to her, too.

"Perhaps on some such night as this," he said, and at once took the words
back. "No! You were born on a sunny morning of July and the blackbirds on
the branches told the good news to the blackbirds on the lawn, and the
stream took up the message and rippled it out to the ships upon the sea.
There were no wrecks that day."

Sylvia turned to him, her face made tender by a smile, her dark eyes kind
and bright.

"Hilary!" she whispered. "Oh, Hilary!"

"Sylvia!" he replied, mimicking her tone. And Sylvia laughed with the
clear melodious note of happiness. All her old life was whirled away upon
those notes of laughter. She leaned to her lover with a sigh of
contentment, her hair softly touching his cheek; her eyes once more
dropped to the still garden and the dark square house at the down's foot.

"There you asked me to marry you, to go away with you," she said, and she
caught his hand and held it close against her breast.

"Yes, there I first asked you," he said, an