f very agreeable I may
tell you."

CHAPTER XXVI

HOW IT ENDED--AND BEGAN.

The railings and uprights of the porch were strips of jet against a
world swimming in blue and silver gray. The planks creaked under our
feet. A confusion of saddles and farm gear hung against the log walls.
The tin basin stood on its accustomed shelf. The world of magic was
jumbled with the commonplace. I led her over to the corner where the eye
could gather in the widest vista. She stood there before me very upright
and slim and her eyes held mine as frankly as a child's might have done.
I gazed at her for a moment more, then my arms went out and encircled
her, and I talked very fast and very low.

"I may, at times, seem extremely abrupt," I confessed, "but I'm not.
I've worshiped you upon a coral reef and I've made love to you through
endless days and nights with stars for my witnesses much larger than
these--and softer. And now I've found you--I've found you, and it
doesn't matter what you say, because I shall never again let you go."

She tilted her face upward and her eyes were dancing as she quoted,
"'Nobody asked you, sir.'"

She stood there, facing me, within the circle of my arms, with her chin
as proudly tilted as though she were not surrendering, and with the old
incomparable smile lingering on her lips.

And as I gazed at her in the witchery of the moon, the utter
improbability of it all dawned upon me, until I felt that a moment would
bring awakening and the old gnawing despair. The expression was that
which I knew so well, and she seemed no more and no less real than she
had been, looking out from the mate's chest, with the circle of
mahogany-skinned savages sitting silent before her shrine.

That I had loved her was inevitable. It was written, but that was the
lesser part. Here she stood looking at me out of eyes that were
accepting my love without question. Why did she, without even the siege
of a long wooing, so permit me to step into the temple of her life, as
naturally as though it were the shrine of the coral island where I
belonged as high-priest and demi-god?

She had, before to-night, met me only once, and then I had been the
churl, brusquely rebuffing her sweet courtesy. Yet she had ridden across
the hills, and something sang to me that it was to me she had ridden,
though she may have called it coming to her brother. Why was it? Had I
really conjured her soul to me by wishing it across the world? Had
s