t with
safety-pins if it doesn't hang right, and as long as I'm at the church
door on time, nothing else really matters. And I've given you my word
on that."

And she had vaulted the wall and taken a short cut through the golf
course until she had come up behind the man who loved her; and he,
reading the trouble in her strange eyes, had drawn her hands to his
heart and held them tight.

How often had they stood in the shade of the fir trees in the heat of
the day, with the intoxicating smell of the pines in their nostrils,
and the soothing sound of the humming of many bees in their ears.

They had stood so still, so close, and so very much alone.

Oh! he loved her and her ways!

Loved the rarity of her beauty, and the vitality of her body, loved the
extreme care she took not to allow her fingers to touch his when
passing a cup or a hefty sandwich.

Revelled in the surge of colour which swept her face when sometimes he
caught and steadied her on a rock; and the way in which, when sitting
on the sand, she would suddenly scrunch up her knees with her arms for
no apparent reason, and bury her scarlet mouth, and the eyes which
betrayed her, in the rough tweed of her skirt.

He exulted in the little half-catch of her breath, the little happy
laugh, the extra polish he knew she put on her boots just for his sake;
and, above all, that perfect sense of virgin woman which emanated from
her, allied to the promise of a passion which most inhabitants of a
northern clime would have utterly misconstrued and misunderstood.

Yes! He revelled and he exulted in every minute of every hour spent
with her; blinded with love, led astray by the thought of months ahead
in which he felt that Fate surely would find a way out for them, he let
the time slip by, up to the moment when Leonie said good-bye quite
gravely, shaking her head without a smile at the usual invitation to
meet on the morrow.

CHAPTER XX

"Working spells
Upon a mind o'erwrought!"--_Thomas Hardy_.

Secure in the solitude of her last few hours of freedom; oblivious of the
fact that her aunt, enraged and alarmed at the unseemly and most untimely
absence of the morrow's bride, was idiotically wringing her hands as she
ran up and down in front of the cottage; worn out and weary with despair,
Leonie, in her bathing dress, had gone to sleep with the full moon
shining down upon the small, pale face, full of shadows.

Jan Cuxson, uneasy at the girl's curt r