ed her, he felt her arm tremble.

"Are you ill?" he asked, in a frightened voice.

She shook her head, and smiled. She had read the love-letters, and she
had read, too, what silence must cost him. Other persons might see
only wonderful art in the portrait, but she saw all the rest, and,
because she saw it, silence seemed futile.

"It is a miracle!" she whispered.

The man stood for a moment at her side, then his face became gray,
and he half-wheeled and covered it with his hands.

The girl took a quick step to his side, and her young hands were on
his shoulders.

"What is it, dear?" she asked.

With an exclamation that stood for the breaking of all the dykes he
had been building and fortifying and strengthening through the past
months, he closed his arms around her, and crushed her to him.

For a moment, he was oblivious of every lesser thing. The past, the
future had no existence. Only the present was alive and vital and in
love. There was no world but the garden, and that world was flooded
with the sun and the light of love. The present could not conceivably
give way to other times before or after. It was like the hills that
looked down--unchangeable to the end of things!

Nothing else could count--could matter. The human heart and human
brain could not harbor meaner thoughts. She loved him. She was in his
arms, therefore his arms circled the universe. Her breath was on his
face, and life was good.

Then came the shock of realization. His sphinx rose before him--not a
sphinx that kept the secrets of forty dead centuries, but one that
held in cryptic silence all the future. He could not offer a love
tainted with such peril without explaining how tainted it was. Now, he
must tell her everything.

"I love you," he found himself repeating over and over; "I love you."

He heard her voice, through singing stars:

"I love you. I have never said that to anyone else--never until now.
And," she added proudly, "I shall never say it again--except to you."

In his heart rose a torrent of rebellion. To tell her now--to poison
her present moment, wonderful with the happiness of surrender--would
be cruel, brutal. He, too, had the right to his hour of happiness, to
a life of happiness! In the strength of his exaltation, it seemed to
him that he could force fate to surrender his secret. He would settle
things without making her a sharer in the knowledge that peril
shadowed their love. He would find a way!

Standing t