ill in his eyes, and the
next moment she found herself yielding to his impatient kisses.

"I was trying to decide whether I love you more when you are with me or
when you are away," she said with a joyful laugh.

"Well, as for me, I love you exactly a hundred times more when I see
you," he retorted gayly.

His words seemed, as she repeated them, an affront to her insatiable
desire for the perfection of love.

"Then if you never saw me again you would be able to forget me?" she
asked a little wounded.

He laughed easily with a quick return to his pleasant banter, "I hope
so. What's the use of loving when nothing comes of it?"

When nothing comes of it! A cloud dimmed the radiant clearness of her
morning; then she met the strong tenderness in his eyes, and with an
effort, she thrust her disappointment aside, as she had thrust it aside
at every meeting since the beginning of her love.

"I have always wondered if happiness were as happy as people thought,"
she said gravely, "and now I know, I know."

"And is it really?" he asked, with the confident smile which piqued her
even while it fascinated.

For answer she lifted to him "the seraphic look" which he had never seen
in any face but hers; and as he met her eyes it appeared to him that all
other women whom he had loved were but tinted shadows--that they were
one and all utterly devoid of the mystery by which passion lives. Here
in her face he saw at last the charm and the wonder of sex made
luminous; and while he watched her emotion quiver on her lips, he began
to ask himself if this were not the assurance in his own heart of a
feeling that might endure for life? Would this, too, change and perish
as his impulses had changed and perished until to-day?

"Shall I tell you what I have been thinking since last night?" she
questioned in a voice that was like a song to his ears, "it is that I
have been all my life a plant in a dark cellar, groping toward the light
and never finding it--always groping, groping."

She leaned toward him, placing her hands, the lovely, delicate hands he
loved, upon his shoulders, "I've grown to the light! I've grown to the
light!" she whispered joyously.

He raised her hand to his lips, and his teeth closed softly over each
slender finger one by one.

"So I am the light?" he enquired with tender humour.

She shook her head. "Not you, but love."

A short laugh broke from him. "But where, my dear sweetheart," he
retorted? "would lov