better than
Romance. The simple honesty of a loving, trusting heart was better than
a legend of flowers, an hallucination of the moonlight. She came nearer.
Bathed in sunlight, he saw her face to face, saw her hair hanging in two
straight plaits on either side of her face, saw the enchanting fulness
of her lips, the strange, balancing movement of her head upon her
slender neck. But now she was no longer asleep. The wonderful eyes,
violet blue, heavy-lidded, with their perplexing, oriental slant towards
the temples, were wide open and fixed upon his.

From out the world of romance, out of the moonlight and the star sheen,
out of the faint radiance of the lilies and the still air heavy with
perfume, she had at last come to him. The moonlight, the flowers, and
the dream were all vanished away. Angele was realised in the Wheat. She
stood forth in the sunlight, a fact, and no longer a fancy.

He ran forward to meet her and she held out her arms to him. He caught
her to him, and she, turning her face to his, kissed him on the mouth.

"I love you, I love you," she murmured.

*****

Upon descending from his train at Port Costa, S. Behrman asked to be
directed at once to where the bark "Swanhilda" was taking on grain.
Though he had bought and greatly enlarged his new elevator at this port,
he had never seen it. The work had been carried on through agents, S.
Behrman having far too many and more pressing occupations to demand
his presence and attention. Now, however, he was to see the concrete
evidence of his success for the first time.

He picked his way across the railroad tracks to the line of warehouses
that bordered the docks, numbered with enormous Roman numerals and full
of grain in bags. The sight of these bags of grain put him in mind of
the fact that among all the other shippers he was practically alone
in his way of handling his wheat. They handled the grain in bags;
he, however, preferred it in the bulk. Bags were sometimes four cents
apiece, and he had decided to build his elevator and bulk his grain
therein, rather than to incur this expense. Only a small part of his
wheat--that on Number Three division--had been sacked. All the rest,
practically two-thirds of the entire harvest of Los Muertos, now found
itself warehoused in his enormous elevator at Port Costa.

To a certain degree it had been the desire of observing the working of
his system of handling the wheat in bulk that had drawn S. Behrman to
Port C