t of our position as the yacht
changed its course among the keys, two far-off pine trees, appearing to
move out side by side across the sea, stopped in the center of the moon.
She caught her breath at the unusual beauty of this. That sigh from her,
and the mystic night, all but drove me mad. My senses swayed with the
throb of some vast indwelling orchestra.

"Let's take the silvery path," I whispered, putting my arms about her.
"Look, it leads to the gate of our Secret world, where we first found
happiness!"

"Oh, dear Jack," she pleaded--but I would not be stopped, and words
stumbled over each other in my agony to persuade her.

"It's Fate--your destiny! I can't change it, neither can you! It spoke
to us beneath our two big pines on the Oasis; it's speaking
to-night--saying you shall never leave me!"

"Oh, but Jack, that's so impossible! He'll _make_ me go!"

I saw the glitter of tears upon her cheeks, and answered fiercely:

"He can't, when I love you as I do!"--and whispered over and over:
"Sweetheart, sweetheart, I love you!"

She had not moved. The moon, by this time high enough to have mustered
its forces, frosted the yacht into the semblance of a dream-ship, and we
might, indeed, have been sailing upon some phantom lake in fairyland. My
eyes were pleading for hers until she raised them--and then they could
not turn away. Held and blended by a mesmeric force, they began to give
and answer question for question, secret for secret. I saw the quick
pulsations in her throat, which seemed to be beating in my veins,
instead.

"Oh, Jack," she whispered, laughing tremulously, with a subdued madness
that was made for such a night as this, "let me go back to Echochee!"

But I could only answer as I had before:

"I love you--I love you!"

"Darling, darling Jack," she begged, taking my cheeks in her palms, "you
mustn't--you really mustn't! Let me go, dear!--Oh, I believe my throne
is--is tottering!"

"And my reason with it!" I cried, drawing her quickly, passionately, up
to me.

For a long time a silvery yacht glided across a silvery sea, while in
far-off Azuria a throne did totter and fall; but ten thousand loyal
subjects smiled in their sleep that night at a strangely happy dream,
wherein their little Princess was pressing upon the lips of an unknown
beggar the seal of her eternal sovereignty.

When again we thought of the moon it had climbed surprisingly high,
making our shadow on the spotless deck seem l