can do this? You never would have done it, I know,--and I couldn't
face that. Don't you understand that I am demanding the great
sacrifice?"

"Sacrifice!" he repeated. His fingers turned, and closed convulsively on
hers.

"Yes, sacrifice," she said gently. "Isn't it the braver thing?"

Still he failed to catch her meaning.

"Braver," she explained, with her wonderful courage, "braver if I love
you, if I need you, if I cannot do without you."

He took her in his arms, crushing her to him in his strength, in one
ineffable brief moment finding her lips, inhaling the faint perfume of
her smooth akin. Her lithe figure lay passively against him, in
marvellous, unbelievable surrender.

"I see what you mean," he said, at length, "I should have been a coward.
But I could not be sure that you loved me."

So near was her face that he could detect, even under the obscurity of
the branches, a smile.

"And so I was reduced to this! I threw my pride to the winds," she
whispered. "But I don't care. I was determined, selfishly, to take
happiness."

"And to give it," he added, bending down to her. The supreme quality of
its essence was still to be doubted, a bright star-dust which dazzled
him, to evaporate before his waking eyes. And, try as he would, he
could not realize to the full depth the boy of contact with a being whom,
by discipline, he had trained his mind to look upon as the unattainable.
They had spoken of the future, yet in these moments any consideration of
it was blotted out. . . It was only by degrees that he collected
himself sufficiently to be able to return to it. . . Alison took up
the thread.

"Surely," she said, "sacrifice is useless unless it means something,
unless it be a realization. It must be discriminating. And we should
both of us have remained incomplete if we had not taken--this. You would
always, I think, have been the one man for me,--but we should have lost
touch." He felt her tremble. "And I needed you. I have needed you all
my life--one in whom h might have absolute faith. That is my faith, of
which I could not tell you awhile ago. Is it--sacrilegious?"

She looked up at him. He shook his head, thinking of his own. It seemed
the very distillation of the divine. "All my life," she went on, "I have
been waiting for the one who would risk everything. Oh, if you had
faltered the least little bit, I don't know what I should have done.
That would have destroyed what was left of me, put out, I