w everything can be
managed, and then you will meet me here, under this tree, and we will go
away together and be married, and for a week at least I will make the
time to stay with you, as your lover, and you shall be absolutely and
truly my sweetest wife."

"Yes," said Halcyone, perfectly content.

"And after that," he went on, "I will arrange that you stay somewhere
near me, so that every moment that I am free I can come back to the
loving glory of your arms."

"I cannot think of any other heaven," the tender creature murmured. And
then she nestled closer, and her voice became dreamy.

"This is what God means in everything," she whispered. "In the
Springtime, which is waiting for the Summer--in all the flowers and all
the trees. This is the secret the night has taught me from the very
beginning, when I first was able to spend the hours in her arms."

Then this mystery of her knowledge of the night he had to probe; and she
told him, in old-world, romantic language, how she had discovered the
stairs and Aphrodite, and even of the iron-bound box which she had never
been able to move.

"It contains some papers of that Sir Timothy, I expect," she said. "We
know by the date of the breastplate that it was when Cromwell sent his
Ironsides to search La Sarthe that he must have escaped through the door
and got to the coast; but he was drowned crossing to France, so no one
guessed or ever knew how he had got away--and I expect the secret of the
passage died with him, and I was the first one to find it."

"Then what do you make of the goddess's head?" asked John Derringham.
"Was that his, too?"

"Yes, I suppose so," she answered. "He was a great, grand seigneur--we
know of that--and had traveled much in Italy when a young man, and
stayed at Florence especially. He married a relative of the Medici
belonging to some female branch, and he is even said to have been to
Greece; but in the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany he would certainly
have learned to appreciate the divine beauty of Aphrodite. He must have
brought her from there as well as the Hebe and Artemis, which are not
nearly so good. They stand in the hall--but they say nothing to me."

"It would be interesting to know what the papers are about," John
Derringham went on. "We must look at them together some day when you are
my wife."

"Yes," said Halcyone, and thrilled at the thought.

"So it was through the solid masonry you disappeared last night? No
wonder,