lf was ignorant of it, possessed almost as vital an
attraction for him as he found in love.

But the next morning, when he descended from the train and saw Laura
awaiting him against a green background of forest, all recollection of
Barclay and his financial genius, was swept from his thoughts. As he
looked at her small distinguished figure, and met her charming eyes,
radiant with love, he told himself that he had, indeed, got to the good
place in his life at last. The pressure of her hand, the surrender in
her look, the tremor of her voice, appealed to his inflammable senses
with a freshness which he found as delicious as the dawn in which they
stood.

"To think that I'm only beginning to live when I've past forty years!"
he exclaimed, as they rolled in the little cart over the forest road.

Laura held the reins, and while she drove he flung his arm about her
with a boyish laugh.

"But this is heavenly--how did you manage it?" he asked.

"Oh, I came alone in the cart because I wanted these first minutes all
to ourselves," she answered, "I didn't want even Gerty to see how happy
we could be." And it seemed to her as she spoke that all that she had
demanded of happiness was fulfilled at last.

A week later she could still tell herself that the dream was true.
Kemper had thrown himself into his love making with all the zest, as he
said, of his college days; and there was in his complete absorption in
it something of the exclusive attention he devoted to a game of
billiards. It was a law of his nature that he should live each minute to
its utmost and let it go; and this romance of the forest was less an
idyl to him than a delicious experience which one must enjoy to the
fullest and have over. There were moments even when Laura saw his
temperamental impatience awake in his face, as if his thoughts were
beginning already to plunge from the fruition of to-day after the
capricious possibility which lies in to-morrow. In the midst of the
forest, under the gold and green of the leaves, she realised at times
that his moods were more in harmony with the city streets and the rush
of his accustomed eager life.

And yet to Kemper the month was full of an enchantment which belonged
half to his actual existence and half to some fairy stories he
remembered from his childhood. It was more beautiful than the reality,
but still it was not real; and this very beauty in it reminded him at
times of the vanishing loveliness which resul