She laughed again.

"I have known you always," she replied.

I shook my head wonderingly.

"Listen," she commanded. "Once upon a time--that's the way all fairy
stories start--I saw you. You didn't notice me much. I was just a kid,
but I fell in love with you. To be exact, it was ten years ago this
month."

There was no end to wonders. All the loose threads of coincidence were
being plaited into a single cable, and the cable was my life line.

"As I grew up I met a lot of men and they insisted on saying nice things
to me; but they were all things of one kind and that wasn't the kind I
wanted--besides, you see, I was waiting. I knew that some day you would
come and that if you had anything to say it would be different. I
compared them all with you. It wasn't just a girl's romantic
foolishness. There was destiny in it. You know the Moslem text--'man's
fate is about his neck.' You had no chance to escape me."

"I, too, knew it was written," I told her, "but I was afraid we should
meet too late. When I saw you at Lexington I thought it was too late."

"I was never afraid of that," she affirmed. "Sometimes I have known that
you were in danger--and later I've known that you escaped. Then there
was the dream--the one dream about the door that came over and over....
At times it seemed that you were very near. Once at Cairo I felt that I
was going to meet you around some corner or in some bazaar--but I
didn't."

"You might, if you had turned your head," I declared. "Did you by any
chance lose a diary at Cairo?"

This time it was she who was surprised.

"I lost one somewhere," she acknowledged; then as she colored divinely
she demanded, "You didn't find it, did you? You didn't read those fool
things?"

"It wasn't foolishness," I quoted. "There was destiny in it." And then I
made full confession.

"I'm glad you wrote it," I added. "I owe that diary something and I want
all my debt to be to you."

For a moment she was silent, then she looked up again and confronted me
once more with a charge of stupidity.

"And you read that, and knew what football game it was, and yet you
never recognized yourself! What are your brains made of, anyway?"

How could a man reply to such a sublime absurdity as that? I groaned.

"In the diary you wrote of an apotheosis," I confessed. "How in the name
of all that is logical could I connect myself with this admirable,
impossible superman? You failed to give the name."

She looked