y flowed crimsonly to him, calling, calling.

He stopped stock-still. He had been skirting a close-cropped hedge of
box. This had ended abruptly and he was looking straight up a bar of
green-yellow radiance from a double doorway. The latter opened on a
porch and the light, flung across this, drenched an arbor of climbing
roses, making it stand out a mass of woven rubies set in emerald.

He drew a long sigh of more than delight, for framed in the doorway he
saw a figure in misty white, leaning to the gilded upright of a harp. He
knew at once that it was Shirley. Holding his breath, he came closer,
his feet muffled in the thick grass. She wore a gown of some gauze-like
material sprinkled with knots of embroidery and with her lifted face and
filmy aureole of hair, she looked like a tall golden candle. He stood
in the dense obscurity, one hand gripping the gnarled limb of a catalpa,
his eyes following the shapely arms from wrist to shoulder, the
fingers straying across the strings, the bending cheek caressing
the carved wood. She was playing the melody of Shelley's _Indian
Serenade_--touching the chords softly and tenderly--and his lips
moved, molding themselves soundlessly to the words:

"I arise from dreams of thee,
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low
And the stars are shining bright;
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Has led me--who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!"

The serenade died in a single long note. As if in answer to it there
rose a flood of bird-music from beyond the arbor--jets of song that
swelled and rippled to a soaring melody. She heard it, too, for the
gracile fingers fell from the strings. She listened a moment, with head
held to one side, then sprang up and came through the door and down the
steps.

He hesitated a moment, then a single stride took him from the shadow.

CHAPTER XXVII

BEYOND THE BOX-HEDGE

As he greeted her, his gaze plunged deep into hers. She had recoiled
a step, startled, to recognize him almost instantly. He noted the
shrinking and thought it due to a stabbing memory of that forest-horror.
His first words were prosaic enough:

"I'm an unconscionable trespasser," he said. "It must seem awfully
prowly, but I didn't realize I was on private property till I passed the
hedge there."

As her hand lay in his, a strange fancy stirred in him: in that
wood-meeting