double, left-handed compliment," laughed Gordon. "But you
can't say anything that will hurt my feelings to-day, Di. Isn't that
your baby I heap crying? What a heartless mother you are!"

Diane gave him the few minutes alone with Sheba that his gay smile had
asked for. "Get out with you," she said, laughing. "Go to the top of the
hill and look at the lovers' moon I've ordered there expressly for you;
and while you are there forget that there are going to be crying babies
and nursemaids with evenings out in that golden future of yours."

"Come along, Sheba. We'll start now on the golden trail," said Elliot.

She walked as if she loved it. Her long, slender legs moved rhythmically
and her arms swung true as pendulums.

The moon was all that Diane had promised. Sheba drank it in happily.

"I believe I must be a pagan. I love the sun and the moon and I know
it's all true about the little folk and the pied piper and--"

"If it's paganism to be in love with the world, you are a thirty-third
degree pagan."

"Well, and was there ever a more beautiful night before?"

He thought not, but he had not the words to tell her that for him its
beauty lay largely in her presence. Her passionate love of things fine
and brave transformed the universe for him. It was enough for him to
be near her, to hear the laughter bubbling in her throat, to touch her
crisp, blue-black hair as he adjusted the scarf about her head.

"God made the night," he replied. "So that's a Christian thought as well
as a pagan one."

They were no exception to the rule that lovers are egoists. The world
for them to-night divided itself into two classes. One included Sheba
O'Neill and Gordon Elliot; the other took in the uninteresting remnant
of humanity. No matter how far afield their talk began, it always came
back to themselves. They wanted to know all about each other, to compare
experiences and points of view. But time fled too fast for words. They
talked--as lovers will to the end of time--in exclamations and the
meeting of eyes and little endearments.

When Diane and Peter found them on the hilltop, Sheba protested, with
her half-shy, half-audacious smile, that it could not be two hours since
she and Gordon had left the living-room. Peter grinned. He remembered a
hilltop consecrated to his own courtship of Diane.

The only wedding present that Macdonald sent Sheba was a long envelope
with two documents attached by a clip. One was from the Kusiak "Sun