pent in Adam's Garden! There is not a doubt of it! No wonder poor M.
Cartel has taken so big a bite of the Apple."

She laughed again, and Jacqueline laughed too, in mischievous delight.

"Madame!" she coaxed. "Madame!"

"No!" said Maxine, with eyes fixed determinately upon the lights of the
city; while somewhere above her in the cool, clear starlight, a hidden
voice--her own, and not her own--whispered a subtle 'Yes!'

CHAPTER XXIX

The universe is compounded of the miraculous; but love is the miracle of
miracles. Again the impossible had been contrived; again Maxine and
Blake were standing together on the balcony. The Parisian night seemed
as still as a held breath, and as palpitating with human possibilities;
the domes of the Sacre-Coeur loomed white against the sky, dumb
witnesses to the existence of the spirit. The scene was undoubtedly
poetic; yet, placed in the noisiest highway of London or the most
desolate bog-land of Blake's native country, these two would have been
as truly and amply cognizant of the real and the ideal; for the cloak of
love was about them, the vapor of love was before their eyes, and for
the hour, although they knew it not, they were capable of reconstructing
a whole world from the material in their own hearts.

But they were divinely ignorant; they each tricked themselves with the
age-old fallacy of a unique position, each wandered onward in the
dream-like fields of romance, content to believe that the other knew the
hidden way.

The scene bore a perfect similarity to the scene of the first
meeting--about them, the darkness and the quiet--behind them, the little
_salon_ lit by the familiar lamp, showing all the reassuring evidences
of the boy's occupation. For close upon an hour they had enjoyed this
intimacy of the balcony, at first talking much and rapidly upon the
ostensible object of their meeting--Max's quarrel with Blake, later
falling to a happy silence, as though they deliberately closed their
lips, the more fully to drink in the secrets of the night through eyes
and ears. Strange spells were in the weaving, and no two souls are fused
to harmony without much subtle questioning of spirit, many delicate,
tremulous speculations compounded of wordless joy and wordless fear.

Some issue, it was, in this matter of fusing personalities, that at last
caused Maxine to turn her head and find Blake studying her.

The circumstance was trivial--a mere crossing of glances, but it