s words came tumultuously and with an impassioned
earnestness.

"You must not deny me the chance to say something more," he declared.
"What I have said is either too much or too little. You ask me whether I
saw your pearls. When I first spoke to you--a child with all autumn's
glory blazing at your back, did I have eyes for trees and skies and
landscapes; though they were splendid and profligate in their beauty?
No. I saw you--only you! If you had stood against a drab curtain it
would have been the same. You were a child, too young to stir an adult
heart to love or passion.... What was it then that fixed you from that
moment in my heart?"

She looked back at him and asked faintly, "What was it?"

"That same chemistry of souls," he declared. "That same writing of our
futures in one horoscope; a voice that decreed: 'You shall wait for
her,' though I did not understand its message--until now. And now that I
have seen you, how can I think of pearls?"

To hear words of love spoken in a wild onrush of feeling was no new
experience to Mary Burton, yet it was as though she had never heard them
before. In the past her ears had heard, but now her heart was listening,
and her heart pounded in her breast as it drank in what the man said. He
talked fast, with his eyes on her eyes, and his hands grasping her white
shoulders. His heart, too, rather than his tongue, was speaking.

"You will read in every book," he declared, "that such things as this
are impossible. Give our lives the chance to write their own pages and
you will know that they are true and inevitable. To me you have been a
dream--I have told myself over and over again that it was only a dream,
the whimsical imagination of a man who has lived too much to
himself--who was abnormal. Now I have seen you. Had I seen you every day
since that first day it could mean no more to me. At the first syllable
of your voice--I _knew_. I need no further test."

"But I--?" she faltered.

"You shall take all the time you need. I told you that you had stood in
my mind as the spirit of the hills that gave me back my life. I told you
what I have been telling myself. Now I know better. From that first
instant my life has been molded--for this. Though I did not then know
it, I lived because I _had_ to live. I had to live because it was
written that my life should complete itself by loving you. It was not
your hills that gave me health again--it was yourself. You do not
personify the hi