conception, that filled
the world about her with the invisible, announcing hosts of angels. She
could explain nothing--life, death, birth, the ordinary incidents of
every day were but so many signs and portents of 'the unseen wonders;
and every breath she drew seemed as great a miracle to her as the
raising of Lazarus from the tomb.

Closing her eyes she thought of the afternoon before when she had gone
out with her lover in his automobile. Life at the instant had condensed
itself into a flash of experience, and his face as he looked at her had
been clear and strong as the wind which rushed by them. "Faster! faster!
let us go faster!" she had begged, "let me live this one hour flying,"
and even with the words she had wondered if the same rapture would ever
enter into her love again? Was it possible to touch the highest point of
one's being twice in a single lifetime? Was it given to any human
creature to repeat perfection? And he? Would he ever know it again? she
questioned, with an uncertainty sharp as a sword that pierced her
through. Would she ever find in his eyes a look that would be anything
but a shadow of the look she had seen on the day before? Was happiness,
after all, as fluid a quantity as the emotion which gave it birth?

Standing beside the table, she leaned her cheek for a moment upon the
roses in the Venetian vase; and it seemed to her, as the petals brushed
her face, that she felt again his eager kisses fall on her eyes and
throat. The memory sent her blood beating to her pulses; and she saw his
face in her thoughts as she had seen it on that afternoon, transfigured
and intensified by the peculiar vividness of her perceptions.

"There has been nothing like this in my life before," he had said in a
passion of sincerity, "there has been nothing in my life but you from
the beginning." The irony was gone then from his voice; she had found no
hint of even the satirical humour in his eyes; and as she remembered
this now it seemed to her that she had there for the first time--for the
one and only moment since she had known him--succeeded in holding by her
touch that deeper chord of his nature for which she had always felt
herself to be instinctively groping.

She was still brooding over the rapture of yesterday, when the door
opened quickly and Kemper came in with the eager haste in which he
appeared to live every instant of his life. At the first glance she saw
that the ardour of the last afternoon was st