that bore her farther from Paris
filled her heart with gloom, and she made mad plans of escape. Her
emotions having at last been stirred dominated her exclusively. She
wanted Archie every moment. She wrote him to meet the party, casually,
somewhere. But Archie, alas, was altogether too poor to follow his lady
about Europe. She would have sent him the money for the journey if she
had known how to do it. Instead, she sent him picture postcards of the
monuments of southern France and northern Italy.

It was in Venice one languid afternoon in early June, as she was coming
out from Cook's, where she had been to get her mail, that she heard her
name,--"Adelle!... Miss Clark,"--and looking around discovered her lover
leaning against a pillar of the piazza. He had somehow found the means
to follow her, arriving that morning by the third-class train, and had
hung around the piazza, confident that the girl must appear in this
center of civic activity. They at once took to a gondola as the safest
method of privacy. And it was in this gondola, behind the little black
curtains of the _felza_, that Adelle received her second kiss from the
lips of a man. But this time due preparation had been made: the kiss was
neither unexpected nor undesired, and on her part, at least, the embrace
had all the fervor of nature.

As they floated out upon the still waters of the lagoon beyond the
lonely hospital, with the translucent silver haze of the magic city
hanging above them, Adelle felt that heaven had been thrust unexpectedly
into her arms. This was something far beyond the magic touch of her
lamp, and all the sweeter because it came to her as a personal gift,
independent of her fortune. At least she felt so. It is permissible to
doubt if Archie Davis would have been sufficiently stirred by a
penniless girl to have spent his recent remittance in chasing her to
Italy, but such fine discriminations about young love are cruel.
Sufficient for them both, in these gray and golden hours of the June
afternoon in Venice, that they had come together. In time Adelle learned
just how the miracle had been worked. Father Davis's remittance to take
his son back to the ranch had at last arrived with a rather acid letter
of parental instructions from the wine-grower. Archie with the true
recklessness of youth had torn the letter to shreds and cashed the
draft, purchased a third-class ticket for Venice, and put almost all
that was left of the money into a muc