ensitive, proud mouth that now half parted
like a child's. Here eyebrows arched from her straight nose in the
peculiarly graceful curve that falls just short of pride on the one side
and of power on the other, to fill the eyes with a pathos of trust and
innocence. The man watching could catch the poise of her long white neck
and the molten moon-fire from her tumbled hair,--the color of corn-silk,
but finer.

And yet these words meant nothing. A painter might have caught her
charm, but he must needs be a poet as well,--and a great poet, one
capable of grandeurs and subtleties.

To the young man standing there rapt in the spell of vague desire, of
awakened vision, she seemed most like a flower or a mist. He tried to
find words to formulate her to himself, but did not succeed. Always it
came back to the same idea--the flower and the mist. Like the petals of
a flower most delicate was her questioning, upturned face; like the bend
of a flower most rare the stalk of her graceful throat; like the poise
of a flower most dainty the attitude of her beautiful, perfect body
sheathed in a garment that outlined each movement, for the instant in
suspense. Like a mist the glimmering of her skin, the shining of her
hair, the elusive moonlike quality of her whole personality as she stood
there in the ghost-like clearing listening, her fingers on her lips.

Behind her lurked the low, even shadow of the forest where the moon was
not, a band of velvet against which the girl and the light-touched
twigs and bushes and grass blades were etched like frost against a black
window pane. There was something, too, of the frost-work's evanescent
spiritual quality in the scene,--as though at any moment, with a puff
of the balmy summer wind, the radiant glade, the hovering figure, the
filagreed silver of the entire setting would melt into the accustomed
stern and menacing forest of the northland, with its wolves, and its
wild deer, and the voices of its sterner calling.

Thorpe held his breath and waited. Again the white-throat lifted his
clear, spiritual note across the brightness, slow, trembling with. The
girl never moved. She stood in the moonlight like a beautiful emblem of
silence, half real, half fancy, part woman, wholly divine, listening to
the little bird's message.

For the third time the song shivered across the night, then Thorpe with
a soft sob, dropped his face in his hands and looked no more.

He did not feel the earth beneath his