glorious possibility in each other. For I know that you love
me."

"Yes," she said, "I think I have loved you all along, but it never
entered my dreams that you could love me. Even now, when you tell me,
it does not seem as if it could be so, either by the mental process,
or by that of feeling."

He caught her in his arms and kissed her, a kiss so long and tender
that it left her clinging to him, breathless and half awakened.

"Don't think," he said, "feel,--feel my heart and know that every beat
is for you, that every atom of me calls for you, and every drop of
blood obeys, as it would command you. I have tried to reach the ideal
of the love that says, not 'thou must be mine,' but 'I must be thine,'
but I have failed if you can doubt me."

She flung her arms around his neck with sudden passion.

"This is the greatest, the most perfect dream of all," she said; "I
think it must be heaven."

"A new heaven and a new earth," he answered gently.

XV

Women alone know how much attraction there is in the respect which
a master shows them.

BALZAC.

The derelict did not afford them much amusement or information. The
waves soon beat her to pieces on the savage rocks. Apparently she had
been a ship plying between Western ports, probably San Francisco and
Honolulu. In the wreckage washed up there were a few pounds of rice,
and some brooms of what they believed to be sugar-cane. There was
nothing else.

"Not even a lemon!" Robin said disconsolately. "Think of living all
one's natural life not only ten, but ten thousand miles from a lemon."

Adam laughed sympathetically. "It's like a yachting party I remember;
we found that the boat we had engaged had been taken by somebody else,
and our set had to be divided. Later in the evening we discovered that
we had all the sugar and the other crowd all the lemons. ''Twas ever
thus from childhood's hour, I've seen my fondest hopes decay: I never
wanted something sour, but what molasses came my way.' Never mind,
dear. We will go and plant our sugar, and by the time it is ready to
sweeten anything, a whole cargo of lemons may have floated into harbor
right at our door."

They crossed the ranges to the western coast, where there was lower
ground, better fitted to the supposed requirements of rice and cane,
and had a good deal of amusement out of their ignorance, neither of
them having more than a misty idea about either rice or sugar before
they reach th