heir lives
there could not have been detected in either of them the least show of
hesitation or embarrassment. It was as if two travellers in the desert,
dying of thirst, should meet, and each conceive in hallucination that
the other was a spring of sweet water.

Presently David was looking into the lovely face that he held between
his hands. He had by this time squeezed her shoulders, patted her back,
kissed her feet, her dress, her hands, her eyes, and pawed her hair.
They were both very short of breath.

"Violet," he gasped, "what is your name?"

"Violet."

"Whose girl are you?"

"I'm David Larkin's girl."

"All of you?"

"All--all--all----"

It was the beginning of another of those long, tedious afternoons. But
to the young people concerned it seemed that never until then had such
words as they spoke to each other been spoken, or such feelings of
almost insupportable tenderness and adoration been experienced.

Yet back there in Aiken, Sapphira was experiencing the same feelings,
and thinking the same thoughts about them; and so was Billy McAllen. And
when you think that he had already been divorced once, and that
Sapphira, as she herself (for once truthfully) confessed, was still
twenty-five, it gives you as high an opinion of the little bare god--as
he deserves.

THE BRIDE'S DEAD

I

Only Farallone's face was untroubled. His big, bold eyes held a kind of
grim humor, and he rolled them unblinkingly from the groom to the bride,
and back again. His duck trousers, drenched and stained with sea-water,
clung to the great muscles of his legs, particles of damp sand glistened
upon his naked feet, and the hairless bronze of his chest and columnar
throat glowed through the openings of his torn and buttonless shirt.
Except for the life and vitality that literally sparkled from him, he
was more like a statue of a shipwrecked sailor than the real article
itself. Yet he had not the proper attributes of a shipwrecked sailor.
There was neither despair upon his countenance nor hunger; instead a
kind of enjoyment, and the expression of one who has been set free.
Indeed, he must have secured a kind of liberty, for after the years of
serving one master and another, he had, in our recent struggle with the
sea, but served himself. His was the mind and his the hand that had
brought us at length to that desert coast. He it was that had extended
to us the ghost of a chance. He who so recently had been but one of
f