aven.

The emotion he was experiencing was one quite new to him, and he almost
resented it, because it was upsetting some of his beliefs.

The next day, at breakfast, the Professor remarked that he looked pale.

"You rather overwork, John," he said. "To lie about the garden here and
not have to follow the caprices of fashionable ladies at Wendover, would
do you a power of good."

There was no sight of Halcyone all the day. She was living in a
paradise, but hers contained no doubts or uncertainties. She knew that
indeed she had lived and breathed the night before, and found complete
happiness in John Derringham's arms.

That, then, was what Aphrodite had always been telling her. She knew now
the meaning of the love in her eyes. This glorious and divine thing had
been given to her, too--out of the night.

It was fully perceived at last, not only half glanced at almost with
fear. Love had come to her, and whatever might reck of sorrow, it meant
her whole life and soul.

And this precious gift of the pure thing from God she had given in her
turn to John Derringham as his lips had pressed her lips.

She spent the whole day in the garden, sitting in the summer house
surveying the world. The blue hills in the far distance were surely the
peaks of Olympus and she had been permitted to know what existence meant
there.

Not a doubt of him entered her heart, or a fear. He certainly loved her
as she loved him; they had been created for each other since the
beginning of time. And it was only a question of arrangement when she
should go away with him and never part any more.

Marriage, as a ceremony in church, meant nothing to her. Some such
thing, of course, must take place, because of the stupid conventions of
the world, but the sacrament, the real mating, was to be
together--alone.

In her innocent and noble soul John Derringham now reigned as king. He
had never had a rival, and never would have while breath stayed in her
fair body.

By the evening of that day he had reasoned himself into believing that
the whole thing was a dream--or, if not a dream, he had better consider
it as such; but at the same time, as the dusk grew, a wild longing
swelled in his heart for its recurrence, and when the night came he
could not any longer control himself, and as he had done before he
wandered to the tree.

The moon, one day beyond its first quarter, was growing brighter, and a
strange and mysterious shimmer was over everythin