lmost guilty feeling
of having broken an unwritten law, of abducting a princess, and the old
Duncan house had seemed to frown protestingly that such an act should
have taken place under its windows. If Victoria had been--to him--an
ordinary mortal in expensive furs instead of a princess, he would have
snapped his fingers at the pomp and circumstance. These typified the
comforts which, in a wild and forgetful moment, he might ask her to
leave. Not that he believed she would leave them. He had lived long
enough to know that an interest by a woman in a man--especially a man
beyond the beaten track of her observation--did not necessarily mean
that she might marry him if he asked her. And yet--oh, Tantalus! here
she was beside him, for one afternoon again his very own, their two
souls ringing with the harmony of whirling worlds in sunlit space. He
sought refuge in thin thought; he strove, in oblivion, to drain the cup
of the hour of its nectar, even as he had done before. Generations of
Puritan Vanes (whose descendant alone had harassed poor Sarah Austere)
were in his blood; and there they hung in the long gallery of Time,
mutely but sternly forbidding when he raised his hand to the stem.

In silence they reached the crest where the little city ended abruptly
in view of the paradise of the silent hills,--his paradise, where there
were no palaces or thought of palaces. The wild wind of the morning was
still. In this realm at least, a heritage from his mother, seemingly
untrodden by the foot of man, the woman at his side was his. From
Holdfast over the spruces to Sawanec in the blue distance he was lord,
a domain the wealth of which could not be reckoned in the coin of Midas.
He turned to her as they flew down the slope, and she averted her
face, perchance perceiving in that look a possession from which a woman
shrinks; and her remark, startlingly indicative of the accord between
them, lent a no less startling reality to the enchantment.

"This is your land, isn't it?" she said.

"I sometimes feel as though it were," he answered. "I was out here this
morning, when the wind was at play," and he pointed with his whip at a
fantastic snowdrift, "before I saw you."

"You looked as though you had come from it," she answered. "You seemed--I
suppose you will think me silly--but you seemed to bring something of
this with you into that hail. I always think of you as out on the hills
and mountains."

"And you," he said, "belong here