l ofttimes
when the shadows fell and the firelight flickered. Now, beneath a
limitless sky, under a strange radiance, in a wild primeval world--in
this Eden which they two alone occupied--she heard him, the man whom
in her heart she loved, speaking to her once more in very person, and
speaking that very thought which was in her own heart that hour. Her
bosom rose tumultuously, her throat fluttered. Instinctively she
would have fled, but a hand on her shoulder pressed her back as she
would have arisen, and she obeyed--as she had always obeyed him--as
she always would.

"Paradise unfinished--" he whispered, his face close to hers. "You
know what it is that's missing."

Ah! could not a woman also know the longing, the vacancy, the solitude
of an Eden incomplete! She turned to him trembling, her lips half
open, as though to welcome a long-hoped-for draught of happiness.

Alas! it was not happiness, but misery that came; for Constance
Ellsworth now got taste of those bitter waters of life which are
withheld from none. There was a sound of a distant shout--the chance
call of some drunken reveller--far down the street, a tawdry,
unimportant incident, but enough to break a spell, to destroy an
illusion, to awaken a conscience for a man, if that phrase be just.
Dan Anderson turned to look down the long street of Heart's Desire.
It was as though the physical act restored him to another realm,
another mental world. He started, and half shivered as his hand
dropped to his side. His face showed haggard even in the moonlight.

"My God! what am I saying?" he murmured to himself.

Then presently he drew himself up, smiling bitterly. "Some prominent
citizens of the place enjoying themselves," he said and nodded toward
the street. "Don't you think you'd like Heart's Desire?"

The moment of Eve--the woman's moment--the instant for her happiness
was past and gone! The light of the moon lay ghostly over all the
world, but there was no radiance, no joy nor comfort in it now.

The girl herself was silent. She sat looking out over the street
below, instinctively following Dan Anderson's gaze. Voices came to
them, clamorous, strident, coarse. There lay revealed all that was
crude, all that was savage, all that was unlovable and impossible of
Heart's Desire. It had been a dream, but it was a man's dream in
which he had lived. For a woman--for her--for this sweet girl of a
gentler world, that dream could be nothing else th