on't even
know that very well."

They turned to the landscape again. The whole building was growing
quiet. Footsteps were fading away down the halls. Doors clicked faintly
here and there. Somebody was singing softly in the basement laboratory,
and the sunset sky was exquisitely lovely above the quiet gray December
prairies.

"It is too beautiful to last," Elinor said, turning to the young man
beside her. "The joy of it is too deep for us to hold."

She did not mean to stay a moment longer, for all the scene could be
hers forever in memory--imperishable!--and Victor did not mean to detain
her. But her face as she turned from the window, the hallowed setting
of time and opportunity, and a heart-love hungering through hopeless,
slow-dragging months, all had their own way with him. He put out his
arms to her and she nestled within them, lifting a face to his own
transfigured with love's sweetness. And he bent and kissed her red lips,
holding her close in his arms. And in the shadowy twilight, with the
faintly roseate banners of the sunset's after-glow trailing through it,
for just one minute, heaven and earth came very near together for these
two. And then they remembered, and Elinor put her hand in Victor's, who
held it in his without a word.

Out in the hall, Trench with soft lazy step had just come to the study
door in time to see and turn away unseen, and slowly pass out of the big
front door, whistling low the while:

My sweetheart lives on the prairies wide
By the sandy Cimarron,
In a day to come she will be my bride,
By the sandy Cimarron.

Out by the big stone pillars of the portico, he looked toward the south
turret and saw Dr. Fenneben as Vic had seen Elinor on the evening of
the May storm. He did not call, but with a twist of the fingers as of
unlocking a door, he dodged back into the building and up to the chapel
end of the turret stairs to release the Dean.

Dr. Fenneben had started down to the study by the same old "road to
perdition" stairs and paused at the window as Dennie and Burgess were
passing out, unconscious of three pairs of eyes on them. Then the Dean
saw down through the half-open study door the two young people by the
window, and he knew he was not needed there. What that look in his black
eyes meant, as he turned to the half-way window of the turret, it would
have been hard to read. And the picture of a fair-faced girl came back
to his own hungry memory. He was trying to c