at me and laughed.

"The man is also modest," she observed.

"Of course," I demurred, "it's great to see you treading the clouds,
with ideals for your playmates. Moreover, it's appropriate; but I'm down
here, you know, earthbound and extremely mortal. If we are to walk
together you must come down and join me."

"I'll take you up with me," she hospitably asserted, and though since
then she must have discovered many times that she had draped her cloth
of gold upon a lay figure and had made a plumed and mailed knight of a
failure and an inconsequent, yet she has, with gallant stubbornness,
refused to admit it.

"Dearest," I said very humbly, "I have been inconceivably boorish, and
worse. How could you bring yourself to forgive it?"

"Because," she answered, "I'm a woman--and inquisitive. I knew how you
felt, and I wanted to find out why you acted so horridly at Lexington."

"I was trying very hard not to tell you how I felt," I admitted.

"You didn't have to tell me--in words," she laughed. "You told me in a
hundred other ways, that were just as plain."

"Then the only part of my story," I said, a little crest-fallen, "which
is new to you is the information that you were a goddess and I a high
priest, out there in the South Seas?"

"Oh, that wasn't new at all," she ruthlessly enlightened, "I knew that,
too."

"Is there anything you don't know?" I inquired. "What gift of prophetic
vision--"

"There wasn't any vision about it," she interrupted. "I got a letter
from Mrs. Keller the day before you reached Kentucky. I guess when you
get back to New York you'll find one from the captain. His wife wrote to
tell me you were coming. That was why I got a headache and stayed at
home that night."

She laid her hand on my forearm. My sleeves were uprolled to the elbows.

"Dearest," she exclaimed in sudden anxiety, "you're cold!" I suppose I
was, but I had not known it.

* * * * *

It has been some time now since I have written in the diary which had
its birth under such strange circumstances. The narrative went into a
pigeon-hole because I have been too busy living to think of reflecting
upon life. It was a device for moments of emptiness and in later times
also for moments of extraordinary jubilation, but since the last pages
were scribbled there has been enough of celebration in merely living out
the days. Yet now I must add a postscript, so that some time He may
have the full record