ful prospect," I answered. "You're difficult
because of your grace, not the lack of it--if that's what you mean!" But
from her indifferent way of dismissing the subject I judged it was not
what she had meant, at all.

The sun must have set while we were encircling my pool. Then we passed
on into a still denser growth, following a crooked path that led to the
fort--entering a mysterious shadow-land that twilights have the trick of
producing when overhead foliage shuts out the afterglow and the serene
forest gloom is painted in tones of gray. The soft earth we trod was
dark, and the water lay phantom-like in its black bowl. Except for the
few times I held aside a swinging wildwood vine for her to pass, we
might have been two drifting spirits--so quietly did we move, and so
unknowingly were we affected by the hour, the place.

At the edge of our forest, where that long ago prairie fire had blighted
a grove of palm trees that subsequently fell upon each other like an
entangled pile of jackstraws, she took my hand to get across and, freed
from the clinging shadows, we ran out beneath the sky--then gasped in
amazement at its splendor.

It was not a sunset, not an afterglow in the usual sense of afterglows,
but a sky of deep, smouldering red equally distributed from horizon to
horizon; as though everywhere below the world a conflagration raged. I
could not at first speak for the grandeur of it, and when I turned to
her words were again checked by the look upon her face. For this dull,
permeating glow--this enchantment from the heavens--touched her brow,
her cheeks, her parted lips, with a light that aroused in me a thousand
devils and a thousand gods; it lingered over her hair as if striving to
concentrate itself into a halo there; and in her eyes that gazed afar
were suggested the awakening of deeper fires, of wilder mysteries.

"God, what a sky," I at last exclaimed, through sheer panic at the
imminence of crying aloud my love for her.

"What a sky, O God," she whispered, delicately turning my profane
outburst to a sigh of thankfulness.

But, better than she, I knew the meaning of that sky. I knew that down
over the western edge of the world blazed a huge funeral pyre on which
my past was being changed to harmless ashes; while in the east flames
were already lighted beneath the on-coming crucible of destiny, from
whose purifying heat a new love arose. Farther into obscurity would sink
the one; up and on would come the