hey did not kill the Cardinal, but they
conquered him. From his raggedly whiskered lips burst a growl and a yawp
which, too late, he regretted.

The girl gave a little scream and started back and Stuart realized it
was time to reassure her. He rose up, materializing into a tall shape in
the shadows like a jinn conjured from empty blackness.

"It's only me--Stuart Farquaharson," he said, and Conscience gave a
little outcry of delight in the first moment of surprise. But that she
swiftly stifled into a less self-revealing demeanor as she demanded with
recovered dignity, "What are you doing here?"

The boy vaulted the fence and stood at her side while the mollified
Cardinal waved a stubby tail, as one who would say--"Now you see it took
my dog sense to bring you two together. Without me you were quite
helpless."

"Why were you crying, Conscience?" Stuart asked, ignoring alike her
question and the rebuke in her voice, but she reiterated, "What are you
doing here?"

The moon showed a face set with the stamp of tragedy which he imagined
to have settled on his life, but his eyes held hers gravely and he was
no longer hampered with bashfulness. The sight of her tear-stained
faced had freed him of that.

"I come here every night," he acknowledged simply, "to watch you over
there on the porch--because--" He balked a moment there, but only a
moment, before declaring baldly what he had so often failed to announce
gallantly--"Because I'm crazy about you--because I love you."

For a moment she gazed up at him and her breath came fast, then she
suggested, a little shaken, "It isn't much farther on to the house. You
used to come the whole way."

"You told me not to."

"If you had--had cared very much you would have come any way."

"I've cared enough," he reminded her, "to sit out here every night until
you put out your light and went to sleep. If you had wanted me you'd
have said so."

Impulsively she laid a trembling hand on his arm and spoke in rushing
syllables. "I thought you'd come without being sent for--then when I
knew you wouldn't, I couldn't hear it. I wrote you a note to-night.... I
was going to send it to-morrow.... I'm going home the next day."

A whippoorwill called plaintively from the hillside. He had spoken and
in effect she had answered. All the night's fragrance and cadence merged
into a single witchery which was a part of themselves. For the first and
most miraculous time, the flood tide of love had l