rple into heliotrope,
tender greens and lucent blues, burning crimson and fiery red, were
the flames of the driftwood, and in these surely the imagination may
find its happiest auguries. For if the dancing flames, out of their
chastened knowledge, sang only of the past, in the minds of their
watchers they were singing of futures brighter and more glowing than
anything the past had ever known. And so, to two at least of
them,--and perhaps to three,--never surely was there room so radiant
as that bare room in that empty house on Brecqhou.

Miss Penny had the high endowment of a large heart, a wide
imagination, and sentiment sufficient for a high-class girls'
boarding-school.

She found herself for the moment out of place, yet she could not
remove herself without too obvious an intention. She did the next best
thing. She settled herself on her chair in a corner, slipped off her
shoes, sat on her feet, and went to sleep.

Margaret, indeed, glanced at her suspiciously once or twice, without
moving her head by so much as a hair's-breadth. But she seemed really
and truly asleep, and for a moment Margaret was amazed that anyone
could think of sleep in that enchanted room. But then she remembered
that it was different--Hennie was Hennie, and she was she, and it was
for her that the crystal ball of life had opened of a sudden and shown
the radiance within.

How long they sat in silence before the rainbow fire she never knew.

Hennie was snoring gently--purring as one might say--in the most
genuinely ingenuous fashion.

Graeme, in the riot of happy possibilities evoked by the disclosure of
Mr. Pixley's perfidy, would have been content to sit there for ever,
since Margaret was at his side. It was enough to know that she was
there. He did not need to turn his head to enjoy the sight of her with
gross material vision. Every tight-strung fibre of his being told him
of her nearness, in ways compared with which sight and sound and touch
are gross and feeble travesties of communication. Their spirits surely
reached out and touched in that silent communion before the rainbow
fire.

There were many things he wanted to ask her now. But they could wait,
they could wait. The Doubting Castles he had built in his despair had
had no foundations. He was building anew already, and now with rosy
hope and golden faith, and the topstones of his building mingled with
the stars.

He woke of a sudden to a sense of lack of consideration for he