the others."

"What a beautiful feeling!" she said, her blue eyes shining.

"Does it work?" asked Alima, in her keen, swift way. "Do all men in all
countries carry everything? Or is it only in yours?"

"Don't be so literal," Terry begged lazily. "Why aren't you willing to
be worshipped and waited on? We like to do it."

"You don't like to have us do it to you," she answered.

"That's different," he said, annoyed; and when she said, "Why is it?" he
quite sulked, referring her to me, saying, "Van's the philosopher."

Ellador and I talked it all out together, so that we had an easier
experience of it when the real miracle time came. Also, between us, we
made things clearer to Jeff and Celis. But Terry would not listen to
reason.

He was madly in love with Alima. He wanted to take her by storm, and
nearly lost her forever.

You see, if a man loves a girl who is in the first place young and
inexperienced; who in the second place is educated with a background
of caveman tradition, a middle-ground of poetry and romance, and a
foreground of unspoken hope and interest all centering upon the one
Event; and who has, furthermore, absolutely no other hope or interest
worthy of the name--why, it is a comparatively easy matter to sweep
her off her feet with a dashing attack. Terry was a past master in this
process. He tried it here, and Alima was so affronted, so repelled, that
it was weeks before he got near enough to try again.

The more coldly she denied him, the hotter his determination; he was
not used to real refusal. The approach of flattery she dismissed with
laughter, gifts and such "attentions" we could not bring to bear, pathos
and complaint of cruelty stirred only a reasoning inquiry. It took Terry
a long time.

I doubt if she ever accepted her strange lover as fully as did Celis
and Ellador theirs. He had hurt and offended her too often; there were
reservations.

But I think Alima retained some faint vestige of long-descended feeling
which made Terry more possible to her than to others; and that she had
made up her mind to the experiment and hated to renounce it.

However it came about, we all three at length achieved full
understanding, and solemnly faced what was to them a step of measureless
importance, a grave question as well as a great happiness; to us a
strange, new joy.

Of marriage as a ceremony they knew nothing. Jeff was for bringing them
to our country for the religious and the civil ceremony,