hat you mean," he said quietly.

"I mean," she answered, with her eyes cast down, "that two years ago I
promised to love some one else. I must not even hear what you are
trying to say to me."

"I think, Miss Willis," he said gently, "that you should have told me
this before."

"How could I?" begged the girl. "When could I have done it? Why should
I?"

"I do not know," he answered wearily; "only, perhaps it might have
spared me some shade of human anguish."

"Human?" asked Daphne, almost smiling.

"No, no, no," he interrupted, not hearing her. "It would not have done
any good, for I have loved you from the first minute when I saw your
blue drapery flutter in your flight from me. Some deeper sense than
mortals have told me that every footstep was falling on my sleeping
heart and waking it to life. You were not running away; in some divine
sense you were coming toward me. Daphne, Daphne, I cannot let you go!"

The look in the girl's startled eyes was his only answer. By the side
of this sun-browned face, in its beauty and its power, rose before her
a vision of Eustace Denton, pale, full-lipped, with an ardor for
nothingness in his remote blue eyes. How could she have known, in
those old days before her revelation came, that faces like this were on
the earth: how could she have dreamed that glory of life like this was
possible?

In the great strain of the moment they both grew calm and Daphne told
him her story, as much of it as she thought it wise for him to know.
Her later sense of misgiving, the breaking of the engagement, the
penitence that had led to a renewal of the bonds, she concealed from
him; but he learned of the days of study and of quiet work in the
shaded corners of her father's library, and of those gayer days and
evenings when the figure of the young ascetic had seemed to the girl to
have a peculiar saving grace, standing in stern contrast to the social
background of her life.

He thanked her, when she had finished, and he watched her, with her
background of misty blue distance, sitting where the shadow of the
ilexes brought out the color of her scarlet lips and deep gray eyes.

"Daphne," he said presently, "you have told me much about this man, but
you have not told me that you love him. You do not speak of him as a
woman speaks of the man who makes her world for her. You defend him,
you explain him, you plead his cause, and it must be that you are
pleading it with yourself, for I have