lls, but the hills personify you. My dream is no longer
a dream, it is a reality. I love you."

"But I have told you," she persisted, "that I am not what you think."

"You are what I know. I love you."

She stood tremblingly before him, and her words came with a whispered
wonderment.

"Things like this don't happen," she said. Then she added, "All the
things you tell me are such things as life laughs at, and yet there is
another side--my side. I have yearned to feel something that had the
power to lift me out of myself and make me gloriously helpless,
something big enough to set my heart beating beyond control--and I never
have felt it--till now. I--I am not the same girl. I don't know
myself.... You have come and I am suddenly different."

"Love's chemistry," he assured her. "The Mary Burton of this moment is
to be the Mary Burton of always, until she becomes Mary Edwardes."

"At all events, I must be alone--to think," she told him. "You can go
and dance, if you like. I've been here two days and I know all the
secret passages. I'm going to slip into my room by a back stairway and
think hard about how angry I am to be with you tomorrow."

"And I," he answered, "shall not dance. I am going to sequester myself
in the woods and pray the gods of fair auspices that you won't be too
angry."

CHAPTER XI

Mary Burton made her way between tall hedgerows of box where an alley of
shade ran to a side terrace, and when she had gained her own room her
eyes were aglow with a new and rather radiant sort of smile, that also
crept to the corners of her lips and hovered happily. It was a vague
smile, but if the man who had enticed it there had seen it, he would
have felt reassured. The threat of tomorrow's wrath would not have
troubled him.

When Mary Burton, changed into bedroom attire, had dismissed her maid
for the night, she still moved about with a restlessness which did not
at once yield to the composure needed for the rigid self-analysis upon
which she was resolved. She stood before the mirror and looked gravely
into the glass.

With the lustrous masses of hair falling braided over her shoulders and
the new glow of discovery in her eyes she might have been a girl just
budding into womanhood. She seemed in the last hour to have slipped back
into the blossom time of her beauty--and though it was a beauty which
she had always realized she now felt a new happiness in its possession.
Heretofore her pride had been s