iterally. "But----"

"If not in law she was in heart, and she was meant for me from the
beginning of time," said Ian.

Then we went out to the dear Gray Dragon, which was white with dust, and
so was dear Vedder.

"It's all right," Ian said to the stolid-looking fellow; and Vedder
answered, "Hurrah to heaven, sir!" which was a very queer expression,
but I liked it, and loved him for it. Basil used to say that chauffeurs
are a strange new race of men, but I think they are splendid. I hoped
that Ian would double Vedder's wages, and afterward he did.

We drove fast to Sweetheart Abbey, with the heather moon in the east, a
sweet, pale, thin-cheeked moon, past her prime of youth, but more
beautiful and kind than ever. As we flew along the empty road, the Gray
Dragon purring with joy in our joy, rabbits ran ahead of us, like tiny
messengers impatient to tell the good news of what had happened. Our
big, white headlight turned them into bouncing, gray balls, and there
were dozens of them, tearing along just in front of us sometimes, but we
would not have killed or hurt one for its weight in gold.

Ian took for us at the inn the very rooms he had taken before for Mrs.
James and me; and in his arms, with no lamplight but the heather moon
smiling through the window at us, I told him about my dream of his
bringing me the locked ebony and silver box, which could be opened only
with the rainbow key.

"It was a true dream, my darling," he said. "My heart was locked up in a
box for many years, and nobody but you could have opened it, for you are
_you_, and you have the key of the rainbow in your little hands. Never
will the box be locked again. Now my heart doesn't need, doesn't want a
box, because it is forever in your keeping."

There, at Sweetheart Abbey, in the little inn where I first began to ask
myself if Ian were not the One Man beside whom all others were shadows,
we told each other things and explained things that had seemed
mysterious.

I told him how I had worshipped him from the beginning, and couldn't
help going on to care more and more, though I feared that he liked Mrs.
West, and thought of me only as a child. "But I wasn't a child," I said.
"From the first minute I loved you I was a woman."

"You must have been a baby, or you would never have thought for a second
that I or any man could remember Mrs. West's existence when you were
there," he said scornfully. But as he was holding me very tightly in his
arms,