y as some men do; he did not sip sparingly and temperately; but he
drank deeply and swiftly so that the wine of love tingled through his
blood, made his brain reel and his heart grow hot. It intoxicated his
soul and his senses with a rare, glorious intoxication.

He tossed his head back, holding her still a little further from him,
and looked into her eyes. His own had changed now, changed utterly in
their eloquent speech. They had been fierce, now they grew wonderfully
tender. They had been clear and bright and eager; and now they were
misty. The first flame of love had leaped through his blood; now an
infinite yearning, as gentle as tears, rose from his heart. Love had
clamoured, now love was whispering. Love had been insistent; now it
pleaded. It had been masterful; now it knelt.

"You love me--_like that_?"

The tumult in the man's soul had awakened conflicting emotions under
the troubled, tremulous breasts. She looked at him with wide, clear
eyes, wondering. A miracle, the old, eternal, primal miracle, had
entered her life. She had looked down, laughingly, on a careless boy;
she had been gripped mightily in the arms of a being new to her, a man
who loved. From the clear blue of her life's sky there had leaped out
a flash of lightning that filled the universe with its light and heat.
They had been two gay loitering children; now she saw the man shaken in
the gust of his passion.

"You love me--_like that_?"

"God forgive me, yes!"

His voice was steady now but low, scarcely louder than her awed
whisper. He dropped his arms, letting them fall lingeringly, and
stooping a little, touched her forehead with his lips.

"And," he said with a reverence which stirred her more than his rude
embrace had done, "I love you like this, dear."

More often than not the story of one's life is a smooth running tale,
the day's page turning gently, going on with the unfinished sentence of
yesterday, the end of each little chapter guessed before it has been
read. But there are times when the leaves no longer turn slowly but
are caught in a sudden gust that sends them fluttering like dead leaves
in a September gale; when life no longer loiters, but leaps when the
unseen end of the chapter is a mystery, when the letters on the page
are shining gold or fiery red.

Such a time had come into Wanda Leland's life. In one swift moment she
had risen to a pinnacle, she had looked down upon the level lowlands
from the heig