sign of madness,
this!"

She burst into tears, stretched out her hands--the impulsive gesture of
a child, and the desire of his life became suddenly a faint thing beside
his great love of her. He drew her tenderly to him.

"Eleanor," he whispered, "you know that I love you. Give yourself to me,
to guard and to keep. You are the first woman who has ever come into my
life. You will be the last. I will keep you from all harm. I will help
you stifle those evil memories. You shall be my wife, and I will teach
you that love is the greatest and the sweetest thing in the world."

He held her from him and looked anxiously into her face. There was scant
comfort there for him.

"When you talk like that," she murmured, "I feel that I must be
different from all other people. You expect something from me which I
know nothing about. I do not feel toward you in the least like you say
you feel toward me. Why is it?"

"It will come!" he declared confidently. "I am sure of it. In the future
it must come."

She moved away and Powers watched her wistfully. She was thinner than he
had ever known her, and of that wonderful fresh beauty which had taken
London by storm there remained but few traces. Yet to him there came at
that moment a wonderful impulse of love. The wistfulness which shone in
her eyes, the wasted cheeks, the pallor of her once beautiful
complexion, seemed in a sense to have spiritualized her. The child whose
frank sensuousness had horrified him seemed to have passed away.

Once more she was the girl whom he had met on the wet pavement of the
city, brave and womanly, although in desperate straits--the woman who,
however unexpectedly, had first found her way to his heart. Never, even
in those days when her beauty had been unrivaled, and her train of
admirers a constant source of embarrassment, had she seemed to him more
to be desired than at that moment.

As she walked she began to sing softly and to herself. He wondered at
the strange chanting tune and at the time-forgotten words. And as she
sang the color brightened her cheeks, and the wakening breezes blew the
hair about her face.

A great sea-bird, disturbed by her voice, rose from the ditch below with
a flapping of wings and drifted away seaward.

"It is only a bird," she said. "If you had seen as many of them as I
have, you would not heed them. I have seen them in droves, when their
wings darkened the sky, and I have heard them calling to one another
down the