his tone alarmed and touched her. It was as
when some great animal composes itself for death, as when a great ship
goes down at sea.

She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer and looked
into her eyes.

"You are not always happy, too?" he asked.

"No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think."

"You have a trouble?"

"Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do that, I
could cure it."

He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when they
pray, and said falteringly, "If I own all the world, I give him you."

Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand on his.

"Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even then I should
not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already."

She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare. She sat still
and waited for the traditions in which she had always believed to speak
and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged to an ultra-refined
civilization which tries to cheat nature with elegant sophistries. Cheat
nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third--Can
we ever rise above nature or sink below her? Did she not turn on
Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero
in his seraglio? Does she not always cry in brutal triumph: "I am here
still, at the bottom of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot
starve me nor tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I
am its destiny."

This woman, on a windmill tower at the world's end with a giant
barbarian, heard that cry tonight, and she was afraid! Ah! the terror
and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then
we have not lived.

"Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has begun
again," she said.

He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his arm about
her to help her. That arm could have thrown Thor's hammer out in the
cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her, and his hand trembled
as it had done in the dance. His face was level with hers now and the
moonlight fell sharply upon it. All her life she had searched the faces
of men for the look that lay in his eyes. She knew that that look had
never shone for her before, would never shine for her on earth again,
that such love comes to one only in dreams or in impossible places like
this, unattainable always. This was Love's self, in a moment it would
die. Stung by