cean under the moon's white eye.

Condy and Blix sat quiet and without speech, not caring to break the
charm of the evening. For quite five minutes they sat thus, watching
the stars light one by one, and the immense gray night settle and
broaden and widen from mountain-top to horizon. They did not feel the
necessity of making conversation. There was no constraint in their
silence now.

Gently, and a little at a time, Condy turned his head and looked at
Blix. There was just light enough to see. She was leaning back in her
chair, her hands fallen into her lap, her head back and a little to one
side. As usual, she was in black; but now it was some sort of
dinner-gown that left her arms and neck bare. The line of the chin and
the throat and the sweet round curve of the shoulder had in it
something indescribable--something that was related to music, and that
eluded speech. Her hair was nothing more than a warm colored mist
without form or outline. The sloe-brown of her little eyes and the
flush of her cheek were mere inferences--like the faintest stars that
are never visible when looked at directly; and it seemed to him that
there was disengaged from her something for which there was no name;
something that appealed to a mysterious sixth sense--a sense that only
stirred at such quiet moments as this; something that was now a dim,
sweet radiance, now a faint aroma, and now again a mere essence, an
influence, an impression--nothing more. It seemed to him as if her
sweet, clean purity and womanliness took a form of its own which his
accustomed senses were too gross to perceive. Only a certain vague
tenderness in him went out to meet and receive this impalpable
presence; a tenderness not for her only, but for all the good things of
the world. Often he had experienced the same feeling when listening to
music. Her sweetness, her goodness, appealed to what he guessed must
be the noblest in him. And she was only nineteen. Suddenly his heart
swelled, the ache came to his throat and the smart to his eyes.

"Blixy," he said, just above a whisper; "Blixy, wish I was a better
sort of chap."

"That's the beginning of being better, isn't it, Condy?" she answered,
turning toward him, her chin on her hand.

"It does seem a pity," he went on, "that when you WANT to do the right,
straight thing, and be clean and fine, that you can't just BE it, and
have it over with. It's the keeping it up that's the grind."

"But it's t