under a blue mist, the higher
spruce rising like Gothic spires.

Clavering smiled into her dancing eyes. "You look about fourteen," he
said tenderly.

"I don't feel much more. I spent a month or two every year in these
woods--let us play a game. Make believe that I am Mary Ogden and you
have met me here for the first time and are deliberately setting out to
woo me. Begin all over again. It--you, perhaps!--was what I always
dreamed of up here. I used to row on the lake for hours by myself, or
sit alone in the very depths of the woods. Do you think that famous
imagination of yours could accomplish a purely personal feat? I
haven't nearly as much but I'm quite sure I could. And then--after--we
could just go on from here."

He looked at her in smiling sympathy. "Done. We met last night, Miss
Ogden, and I went down at the first shot. I'm now out to win you or
perish in the attempt. But before we get down to business I'll just
inform you of a resolution I took a day or two ago. I shall get a
license the day we return and marry you the morning you sail."

"Oh!" And then she realized in a blinding flash what she had fought
out of her consciousness: that she had shrunk from the consummation of
marriage, visualized a long period of intermittent but superficial
love-making and delightful companionship, an exciting but incomplete
idyl of mind and soul and senses. . . . Underneath always an undertone
of repulsion and incurable ennui . . . the dark residuum of immedicable
disillusion . . . that what she had really wanted was love with its
final expression eliminated.

But she realized it only as a fact, . . . a psychological study of
another . . . buried down there in an artificial civilization she had
forgotten . . . in that past that belonged to Marie Zattiany . . . with
which Mary Ogden had nothing to do . . . her mind at last was as young
as her body, and this man had accomplished the miracle. The present
and the future were his.

She looked up into his eyes, anxious but imperious, and answered
softly: "Why not?"

"Exactly. I've no desire to take that long journey with you, but I'm
not going to take any chances, either. . . . Ah! Here's an idea that
beats the other hollow. When the party breaks up we'll go down to
Huntersville with them, marry there, and return to the camp. I don't
see how your Dolomites could beat this for a honeymoon. Why in thunder
should we trail all the way over to Europe to