there was a dew like that of dreaming girlhood in her faded eyes.

She was still flushing and trembling when there came a soft knock on her
door, and Paul and Ida stood before her.

Ida was blushing deeply, with downcast face, and the long lashes hid her
eyes. She stood slightly bending forward, her long beautifully moulded
arms hanging straight down before her. She looked like a beautiful
captive, and Paul, as he clasped her waist with his arm, and held one of
her hands in his, looked the proudest of conquerors.

"I did not know but I might be dreaming it," he said, "and so I brought
her for you to see. She says she will be my wife"

CHAPTER XIII.

Paul's courtship of Ida really began the night when he took her in his
arms as his promised wife, for although she had called him her lover
before, his devotion, while impassioned enough, had been too distant and
wholly reverential to be called a wooing. But the night of their
betrothal his love had caught from her lips a fire that was of earth, and
it was no longer as a semi-spiritual being that he worshipped her, but as
a woman whom it was no sacrilege to kiss a thousand times a day, not upon
her hand, her sleeve, or the hem of her dress, but full upon the soft
warm mouth.

This transformation of the devotee into the lover on his part was
attended by a corresponding change in Ida's manner toward him. A model
relieved from a strained pose could not show more evident relief than she
did in stepping down from the pedestal of a tutelary saint, where he had
placed her, to be loved and caressed like an ordinary woman, for if the
love had at first been all on his side, it certainly was not now.

"I'm so glad," she said one day, "that you have done with worshipping me.
Think of your humbling yourself before me, you who are a hundred thousand
times better, and wiser, and greater than I. Oh, Paul it is I who ought
to worship you, and who am not good enough to kiss you," and before he
could prevent her she had caught his hand, and, bowing her face over it,
had kissed it. As he drew it away he felt that there were tears upon it.
It was evening, and he could not see her face distinctly.

"Darling," he exclaimed, "what is the trouble?"

"Oh, nothing at all!" she replied. "It is because I am in love, I
suppose."

Whether it was because she was in love or not it is certain that she took
to crying very often during these days. Her manner with her lover, too,
was often