She did not answer, and as he looked at her closer, he saw that her eyes
were full of tears.

"Virginia!" he cried out sharply, and the next instant, at her first
movement away from him, his arms were around her and his lips seeking
hers.

The world stopped suddenly while a starry eternity enveloped them. All
youth was packed into that minute, all the troubled sweetness of desire,
all the fugitive ecstasy of fulfilment.

"I--I thought you did not care," she murmured beneath his kisses.

He could not speak--for it was a part of his ironic destiny that he, who
was prodigal of light words, should find himself stricken dumb in any
crucial instant.

"You know--you know----" he stammered, holding her closer.

"Then it--it is not all a dream?" she asked.

"I adored you from the first minute--you saw that--you knew it. I've
wanted you day and night since I first looked at you."

"But you kept away. You avoided me. I couldn't understand."

"It was because I knew I couldn't be with you five minutes without
kissing you. And I oughtn't to--it's madness in me--for I'm desperately
poor, darling; I've no right to marry you."

A little smile shone on her lips. "As if I cared about that, Oliver."

"Then you'll marry me? You'll marry me, my beautiful?"

She lifted her face from his breast, and her look was like the enkindled
glory of the sunrise. "Don't you see? Haven't you seen from the
beginning?" she asked.

"I was afraid to see, darling--but, Virginia--oh, Virginia, let it be
soon!"

When he went from her a little later, it seemed to him that all of life
had been pressed down into the minute when he had held her against his
breast; and as he walked through the dimly lighted streets, among the
shadows of men who, like himself, were pursuing some shadowy joy, he
carried with him that strange vision of a heaven on earth which has
haunted mortal eyes since the beginning of love. Happiness appeared to
him as a condition which he had achieved by a few words, by a kiss, in a
minute of time, but which belonged to him so entirely now that he could
never be defrauded of it again in the future. Whatever happened to him,
he could never be separated from the bliss of that instant when he had
held her.

He was going to Cyrus while his ecstasy ennobled even the prosaic fact
of the railroad. And just as on that other evening, when he had rushed
in anger away from the house of his uncle, so now he was exalted by the
consciousness