ng perfectly still against the sun-dial, both hands, laced
together, against her breast, her eyes on his with a strange startled
look. Over the hush of the garden now, like the very soul of the
passionate night, throbbed the haunting barcarole of _Tales of
Hoffmann_:

"Night of stars and night of love--"

an inarticulate echo of his longing. He took a step toward her, and she
turned like one in sudden terror seeking a way of escape. But he caught
her close in his arms.

"I love you!" he said. "Hear it now in my bride's garden that I've made
for you! I love you, I _love_ you!"

For one instant she struggled. Then, slowly, her eyes turned to his, the
sweet lips trembling, and something dawning deep in the dewy blue that
turned all his leaping blood to quicksilver. "My darling!" he breathed,
and their lips met.

In that delirious moment both had the sense of divine completion that
comes only with love returned. For him there was but the woman in his
arms, the one woman created for him since the foundation of the world.
It was Kismet. For this he had come to Virginia. For this fate had
turned and twisted a thousand ways. Through the riot of his senses, like
a silver blaze, ran the legend of the calendar: "Every man carries his
fate upon a riband about his neck." For her, something seemed to pass
from her soul with that kiss, some deep irrevocable thing, shy but
fiercely strong, that had sprung to him at that lip-contact as steel to
magnet. The foliage about them flared up in green light and the ground
under her feet rose and fell like deep sea-waves.

She lifted her face to him. It was deathly pale, but the light that
burned on it was lit from the whitest altar-fires of Southern girlhood.
"Six weeks ago," she whispered, "you had never seen me!"

He held her crushed to him. She could feel his heart thudding madly.
"I've always known you," he said. "I've seen you a thousand times. I saw
you coming to meet me down a cherry-blossomed lane in Kyoto. I've seen
your eyes peering from behind a veil in India. I've heard your voice
calling to me, through the padding camels' feet, from the desert
mirages. You are the dream I have gone searching always! Ah, _Shirley_,
_Shirley_, _Shirley_!"

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE DOCTOR SPEAKS

While the vibrant strings hummed and sang through the roses, and the
couples drifted on tireless and content, or blissfully "sat out" dances
on the stairway, Katharine Fargo held her stat