aimed Victoria, "what a relief! Are you staying in that dear
little house?" she asked, with a glance at the Widow Peasley's.

"Yes," said Austen.

"I wish I were."

He looked at her shyly. He was not a man to do homage to material gods,
but the pomp and circumstance with which she was surrounded had had a
sobering effect upon him, and added to his sense of the instability and
unreality of the present moment. He had an almost guilty feeling of
having broken an unwritten law, of abducting a princess, and the old
Duncan house had seemed to frown protestingly that such an act should
have taken place under its windows. If Victoria had been--to him--an
ordinary mortal in expensive furs instead of a princess, he would have
snapped his fingers at the pomp and circumstance. These typified the
comforts which, in a wild and forgetful moment, he might ask her to
leave. Not that he believed she would leave them. He had lived long
enough to know that an interest by a woman in a man--especially a man
beyond the beaten track of her observation--did not necessarily mean that
she might marry him if he asked her. And yet--oh, Tantalus! here she was
beside him, for one afternoon again his very own, their two souls ringing
with the harmony of whirling worlds in sunlit space. He sought refuge in
thin thought; he strove, in oblivion, to drain the cup of the hour of its
nectar, even as he had done before. Generations of Puritan Vanes (whose
descendant alone had harassed poor Sarah Austere) were in his blood; and
there they hung in the long gallery of Time, mutely but sternly
forbidding when he raised his hand to the stem.

In silence they reached the crest where the little city ended abruptly in
view of the paradise of the silent hills,--his paradise, where there were
no palaces or thought of palaces. The wild wind of the morning was still.
In this realm at least, a heritage from his mother, seemingly untrodden
by the foot of man, the woman at his side was his. From Holdfast over the
spruces to Sawanec in the blue distance he was lord, a domain the wealth
of which could not be reckoned in the coin of Midas. He turned to her as
they flew down the slope, and she averted her face, perchance perceiving
in that look a possession from which a woman shrinks; and her remark,
startlingly indicative of the accord between them, lent a no less
startling reality to the enchantment.

"This is your land, isn't it?" she said.

"I sometimes feel as thoug