hed out to touch
her. She walked like one in stupor--her face ghastly. The arch of her
beautiful eyebrows was like that of Ophelia in her bitterest moment.

The others watched her go in silence.

One of them drew a sigh and said: "I'm going home, too; I don't feel
well."

"I'll go with ye," one of the men said.

"Stay where you are!" said the girl sharply.

* * * * *

Once on the street, the younger girl hurried on the way the stranger had
gone. His face seemed before her.

She could see it; she should always see it. It was the face of a young
man. A firm chin, a strong mouth with a feminine curve in it, a face
with a clear pallor that seemed foreign somehow. But the eyes--oh, the
eyes!

They were deep and brown, and filled with an infinite sadness--for her.
She felt it, and the knot of pain in the forehead, that was also for
her. Something sweet and terrible went out from his presence. A
knowledge of infinite space and infinite time and infinite compassion.

No man had ever looked at her like that. There was something divine in
the penetrating power of his eyes.

Some way she knew he was not a priest, though his cloak and turban cap
looked like it. He seemed like a scholar from some strange land--a man
above passion, a man who knew God.

His eyes accused her and pitied her, while they called her.

No smile, no shrinking of lips into a sneer--nothing but pity and
wonder, and something else----

And a voice seemed to say: "You are too good to be there. Follow me."

As she thought of him he seemed to stand on an immeasurable height
looking down at her.

She had laughed at him--O God!--she flushed hot with shame from head to
foot--but his eyes had not changed. His lips had kept their pitying
droop, and his somber eyes had burned deep into the sacred places of
her thought, where something sweet and girlish lay, unwasted and
untrampled.

"He called me. He called me."

* * * * *

Under the trees where the moonlight threw tracing of shadows she came
upon him standing, waiting for her. She held out her hand to him like a
babe. He was taller than she thought.

He took her hands silently and she grew calm at once. All shame left
her. She forgot her city life; she remembered only the sweet, merry life
of the village where she was born. The sound of sleigh bells and song,
and the lisp of wind in the grass, and songs of birds in the maples came
t