g dawned. The morning of their one day.

Nature had done her best for them and made it all that a May day should
be. There was not one tint, nor tone, nor bit of fragrance lacking.
Silver-throated birds flooded the world with songs of love. The very air
seemed full of beauty and passion and the glory and joy of life in the
dawn of its fullness.

Their arrangements had been hasty, but complete. Paul had stolen away
from Lucerne in the middle of the night, to be ready to welcome his
darling at the-first break of the morning; and it was at a delightfully
early hour that they met at the little hotel on the Buergenstock where
his mother's love-dream had waxed to its idyllic perfection,
one-and-twenty years ago. They sat on the balcony and ate their simple
breakfast, looking down to where the reflection of the snow-crowned
mountains trembled in the limpid lake.

Opal had never before looked so lovely, he thought. She was gowned in
the simplest fashion in purest white, as a bride should be, her glorious
hair arranged in a loose, girlish knot, while her lustrous eyes were
cast down, shyly, and her cheeks were flushed--flushed with the
revelations and memories of the night just passed--flushed with the
promise of the day just dawning--flushed with love, with slumbering,
smouldering passion--with wifehood!

How completely she was his when she had once surrendered!

In their first kiss of greeting, they bridged over, in one ecstatic
moment, the hours of their brief separation. When he finally withdrew
his lips from hers, with a deep sigh of momentary satisfaction, she
looked up into his eyes with something of the old, capricious mischief
dancing in her own.

"Let us make the most of our day, darling, our one day!" she said. "We
must not waste a single minute of it."

Opal had stolen away from Lucerne and had come up the mountain
absolutely unattended. She would share her secret with no one, she said,
and Paul had acquiesced. And now he took her up in his arms as one would
carry a little child, and bore her off to the suite he had engaged for
them. What a bit of a thing she was to wield such an influence over a
man's whole life!

A pert little French maid waited upon them. She eyed with great favor
the _distingue_ young monsieur, and his _charmante epouse!_ There was a
knowing twinkle in her eye--she had not been a _femme de chambre_ even a
little while without learning to scent a _lune de miel!_ And this
promised to be e