hat is
all-sufficient."

They talked no longer for a while. That little hand over his lips seemed
almost too great a happiness for him.

"When the right time comes, then I shall know all. Yet I assure you that
I am ignorant of nothing connected with you, for everything had been
revealed to me before our first meeting. You were to be, and can be,
only the handsomest, the richest, and the most noble of men, the one
above all others; for that has ever been my dream, and in the sure
certainty of its full accomplishment I wait calmly. You are the chosen
hero who it was ordained should come, and I am yours."

A second time she interrupted herself in the tremor of the words she
pronounced. She did not appear to say them by herself alone; they came
to her as if sent by the beautiful night from the great white heavens,
from the old trees, and the aged stones sleeping outside and dreaming
aloud the fancies of the young girl. From behind her voices also
whispered them to her, the voices of her friends in the "Golden Legend,"
with whom she had peopled the air and the space around her. In this
atmosphere she had ever lived--mysticism, in which she revelled until
it seemed fact on one side, and the daily work of life on the other.
Nothing seemed strange to her.

Now but one word remained to be said--that which would express all the
long waiting, the slow creation of affection, the constantly increasing
fever of restlessness. It escaped from her lips like a cry from a
distance, from the white flight of a bird mounting upward in the light
of the early dawn, in the pure whiteness of the chamber behind her.

"I love you."

Angelique, her two hands spread out, bent forward towards Felicien. And
he recalled to himself the evening when she ran barefooted through the
grass, making so adorable a picture that he pursued her in order to
stammer in her ear these same words: "I love you." He knew that now she
was simply replying to him with the same cry of affection, the eternal
cry, which at last came from her freely-opened heart.

"Yes, I love you. I am yours. Lead the way, and I will follow you
wherever it may be."

In this surrender of her soul she gave herself to him fully and
entirely. It was the hereditary flame relighted within her--the pride
and the passion she thought had been conquered, but which awoke at the
wish of her beloved. He trembled before this innocence, so ardent and so
ingenuous. He took her hands gently, and cros