f the part--until to-day."

She was silent a moment, and turned away her head, surveying the
landscape that fell away for miles beyond.

"When I was a child," she said, "I used to think that by opening a door
I could step into an enchanted realm like this. Only I could never
find the door. Perhaps," she added, gayly pursuing the conceit, "it was
because you had the key, and I didn't know you in those days." She
gave him a swift, searching look, smiling, whimsical yet startled,--so
elusive that the memory of it afterwards was wont to come and go like a
flash of light. "Who are you?" she asked.

His blood leaped, but he smiled in delighted understanding of her mood.
Sarah Austen had brought just such a magic touch to an excursion, and
even at that moment Austen found himself marvelling a little at the
strange resemblance between the two.

"I am a plain person whose ancestors came from a village called Camden
Street," he replied. "Camden Street is there, on a shelf of the hills,
and through the arch of its elms you can look off over the forests of
the lowlands until they end in the blue reaches of the ocean,--if you
could see far enough."

"If you could see far enough," said Victoria, unconsciously repeating
his words. "But that doesn't explain you," she exclaimed: "You are like
nobody I ever met, and you have a supernatural faculty of appearing
suddenly, from nowhere, and whisking me away like the lady in the fable,
out of myself and the world I live in. If I become so inordinately
grateful as to talk nonsense, you mustn't blame me. Try not to think of
the number of times I've seen you, or when it was we first met."

"I believe," said Austen, gravely, "it was when a mammoth beast had his
cave on Holdfast, and the valleys were covered with cocoanut-palms."

"And you appeared suddenly then, too, and rescued me. You have always
been uniformly kind," she said, "but--a little intangible."

"A myth," he suggested, "with neither height, breadth, nor thickness."

"You have height and breadth," she answered, measuring him swiftly with
her eye; "I am not sure about the thickness. Perhaps. What I mean to say
is, that you seem to be a person in the world, but not of it. Your
exits and entrances are too mysterious, and then you carry me out of
it,--although I invite myself, which is not at all proper."

"I came down here to see you," he said, and took a firmer grip on the
reins. "I exist to that extent."

"That's unworthy