h might be as Richard Gessner had promised--a truth of
permanence, of the continued possession of this wonderland. Who shall
blame him if his heart leaped at the mere contemplation of this
possibility?

It would have been about nine o'clock when they carried his coffee to
the garden--it was just half-past nine when Anna Gessner returned
unexpectedly to the house. Alban heard the bell in the courtyard ring
loudly, and upon that the throttled purr of a motor's heavy engine. He
had expected Silas Geary, but such a man, he rightly argued, would not
come with so much pomp and circumstance, and he stood at once, anxious
and not a little abashed. Perhaps some suspicion of the truth had
flashed upon him unwittingly. He heard the voice of Fellows the butler
raised in some voluble explanation, there were a few words spoken in a
pleasing girlish tone, and then, the boudoir behind him flashed its
colors suddenly upon his vision, and he beheld Anna Gessner herself--a
face he would have recognized in ten thousand, a figure of yesternight
that would never be forgotten.

She had cast aside her motor veil, and held it in her hand while she
spoke to the butler. A heavy coat bordered and lined with fur stood open
to reveal a gray cloth dress; her hair had been blown about by the fresh
breezes of the night and covered her forehead in a disorder far from
unbecoming. Alban thought that the cold light in the room and the heavy
bright panelling against which she stood gave an added pallor to her
usually pale face, exaggerating the crimson of her lips and the dark
beauty of her eyes. The hand which held the veil appeared to him to be
ridiculously small; her attitudes were so entirely graceful that he
could not imagine a picture more pleasing. If he remembered that he had
likened her to little Lois Boriskoff, he could now admit the
preposterous nature of the comparison. True it was that nationality
spoke in the contour of the face, in its coloring and its expression,
but these elementals were forgotten in the amazing grace of the girl's
movements, the dignity of her gestures and the vitality which animated
her. Returning to the house unexpectedly, even a lad was shrewd enough
to see that she returned also under the stress of an agitation she could
conceal from none. Her very questions to the servants were so quick and
incoherent that they could not be answered. The letters which the
butler put into her hands were torn from the envelopes but wer