cherish
it--that it is important to me--that life or death are not more
important. There! I have confessed all my weakness to you, and now you
will say that I need a few weeks of salt breeze."

"I will sing you the song first. Perhaps we may pluck out its mystery."

She preluded a moment and sang, while Farnham waited with a strained
sense of expectancy, as if something unspeakably serious was impending.
She sang with far more force and feeling than the night before. Her
heart was full of her happy love, as yet unspoken, and her fancy was
pleased with that thought that, under the safe cover of her music, she
could declare her love without restraint. She sang with the innocent
rapture of a mavis in spring, in notes as rich and ardent as her own
maiden dreams. Farnham listened with a pleasure so keen that it
bordered upon pain. When she came to the line,

"I would be so tender, so loving, Douglas,"

he started and leaned forward in his chair, holding his hands to his
temples, and cried,

"Can't you help me to think what that reminds me of?"

Alice rose from the piano, flushing a pink as sweet and delicate as
that of the roses in her belt. She came forward a few paces and then
stopped, bent slightly toward him, with folded hands. In her long,
white, clinging drapery, with her gold hair making the dim room bright,
with her red lips parted in a tender but solemn smile, with something
like a halo about her of youth and purity and ardor, she was a sight so
beautiful that Arthur Farnham as he gazed up at her felt his heart grow
heavy with an aching consciousness of her perfection that seemed to
remove her forever from his reach. But the thought that was setting her
pulses to beating was as sweetly human as that of any bride since Eve.
She was saying to herself in the instant she stood motionless before
him, looking like a pictured angel, "I know now what he means. He loves
me. I am sure of him. I have a right to give myself to him."

She held out her hands. He sprang up and seized them.

"Come," she said, "I know what you are trying to remember, and I will
make you remember it."

He was not greatly surprised, for love is a dream, and dreams have
their own probabilities. She led him to a sofa and seated him beside
her. She put her arms around his neck and pressed his head to her
beating heart, and said in a voice as soft as a mother's to an ailing
child, "My beloved, if you will live, I will be so good to you." She