e too slow. The prayers of all the saints will not save you!" she
replied with a laugh, throwing him a kiss as he disappeared in the dust.

As they drove through the great forest on the cliffs overlooking the
river, the Southern world seemed lit with new splendours to-day for the
Northerner. His heart beat with a strange courage. The odour of the pines,
their sighing music, the subtone of the falls below, the subtle
life-giving perfume of the fullness of summer, the splendour of the sun
gleaming through the deep foliage, and the sweet sensuous air, all seemed
incarnate in the calm, lovely face and gracious figure beside him.

They took their seat on the old rustic built against the beech, which was
the last tree on the brink of the cliff. A hundred feet below flowed the
river, rippling softly along a narrow strip of sand which its current had
thrown against the rocks. The ledge of towering granite formed a cave
eighty feet in depth at the water's edge. From this projecting wall,
tradition said a young Indian princess once leaped with her lover, fleeing
from the wrath of a cruel father who had separated them. The cave below
was inaccessible from above, being reached by a narrow footpath along the
river's edge when entered a mile downstream.

The view from the seat, under the beech, was one of marvellous beauty. For
miles the broad river rolled in calm, shining glory seaward, its banks
fringed with cane and trees, while fields of corn and cotton spread in
waving green toward the distant hills and blue mountains of the west.

Every tree on this cliff was cut with the initials of generations of
lovers from Piedmont.

They sat in silence for awhile, Margaret idly playing with a flower she
had picked by the pathway, and Phil watching her devoutly. The Southern
sun had tinged her face the reddish warm hue of ripened fruit, doubly
radiant by contrast with her wealth of dark-brown hair. The lustrous
glance of her eyes, half veiled by their long lashes, and the graceful,
careless pose of her stately figure held him enraptured. Her dress of
airy, azure blue, so becoming to her dark beauty, gave Phil the impression
of eiderdown feathers of some rare bird of the tropics. He felt that if he
dared to touch her she might lift her wings and sail over the cliff into
the sky and forget to light again at his side.

"I am going to ask a very bold and impertinent question, Miss Margaret,"
Phil said with resolution. "May I?"

Margaret s