the lantern? Let's light
it now." Her voice was rather tremulous.

"Why, sweetest?" He seated himself in the fragrant pine-needles, and
drew her down beside him. "Look, little girl, how high we are above
earth; out of men's knowledge, all the world asleep. We might be gods on
high Olympus. 'You and I alone in Heaven dancing'"--he finished softly
that most beautiful passage out of "Marpessa."

But the Overmind chose that moment to return to duty. It suggested to
Channing that he sounded a trifle histrionic, a trifle as though low
music were about to be played by the orchestra. He caught himself
murmuring inwardly, "What a setting! What a perfect setting!"

"For what?" inquired the Overmind, not at all in disapproval but with a
sort of impersonal interest.

Just then the gifted Mr. Channing would have traded temperaments with
the dullest lout that ever lost his head over a woman.

His self-consciousness reacted upon Jacqueline. All her earlier shyness
returned. She drew the prim little wrapper down over her ankles, and sat
quite stiffly erect, submitting to his embrace, but no longer returning
it.

"I think we'd better be going back now," she said. "Suppose Philip were
to wake up and miss us?"

Channing had an odd and perfectly irrelevant thought of that bulge in
the clergyman's hip-pocket.

"Bother Philip! You'd suppose the man was a sort of watch-dog. I believe
you're afraid of me to-night," he teased, turning her face to his.

Her lips trembled as he kissed them. "It is so dark," she whispered.

"Little goose! Why should the darkness make a difference to you and me?"

"I don't know--but it does." Suddenly she pushed him away, and jumped to
her feet. "Give me the matches, Mr. Channing. I want to light the
lantern and go back."

He obeyed with a shrug, wondering just where and how he had blundered. A
sense of artistic incompleteness mingled with a keen personal sense of
chagrin. Did the girl care less for him than he had thought? Or was it
merely the instinct of self-preservation that had warned her?

Now that the blood ran more coolly in his veins, he blushed to realize
that the instinct had been right.

They went back into the ravine, which, as Jacqueline had prophesied, had
become as dark as a pocket. Without the lantern they could not have seen
a foot ahead of them, and even with the lantern their way was not easy.
They stumbled along, still hand-in-hand and silent; but it was no longer
the deliciou