his prevailed. A faint
color rose from her neck, deepened, and spread over her face and
forehead. In a moment she dropped her eyes.

"Don't you think you stare a little rudely--Mr. Thorpe?" she asked.

Chapter XL

The vision was over, but the beauty remained. The spoken words of
protest made her a woman. Never again would she, nor any other creature
of the earth, appear to Thorpe as she had in the silver glade or the
cloistered pines. He had had his moment of insight. The deeps had twice
opened to permit him to look within. Now they had closed again. But out
of them had fluttered a great love and the priestess of it. Always, so
long as life should be with him, Thorpe was destined to see in this tall
graceful girl with the red lips and the white skin and the corn-silk
hair, more beauty, more of the great mysterious spiritual beauty which
is eternal, than her father or her mother or her dearest and best. For
to them the vision had not been vouchsafed, while he had seen her as the
highest symbol of God's splendor.

Now she stood before him, her head turned half away, a faint flush
still tingeing the chalk-white of her skin, watching him with a dim,
half-pleading smile in expectation of his reply.

"Ah, moon of my soul! light of my life!" he cried, but he cried it
within him, though it almost escaped his vigilance to his lips. What he
really said sounded almost harsh in consequence.

"How did you know my name?" he asked.

She planted both elbows on the Norway and framed her little face
deliciously with her long pointed hands.

"If Mr. Harry Thorpe can ask that question," she replied, "he is not
quite so impolite as I had thought him."

"If you don't stop pouting your lips, I shall kiss them!" cried
Harry--to himself.

"How is that?" he inquired breathlessly.

"Don't you know who I am?" she asked in return.

"A goddess, a beautiful woman!" he answered ridiculously enough.

She looked straight at him. This time his gaze dropped.

"I am a friend of Elizabeth Carpenter, who is Wallace Carpenter's
sister, who I believe is Mr. Harry Thorpe's partner."

She paused as though for comment. The young man opposite was occupied
in many other more important directions. Some moments later the words
trickled into his brain, and some moments after that he realized their
meaning.

"We wrote Mr. Harry Thorpe that we were about to descend on his district
with wagons and tents and Indians and things, and asked him to