in the world;
and,"--he concluded simply--"I took you."

She whispered his name, very softly. What a serenity there is in such
a moment, what a glow of secure happiness, of immunity from the pains
and sorrows of the world!

Robert Cairn, his arms about this girl, who, from his early boyhood,
had been his ideal of womanhood, of love, and of all that love meant,
forgot those things which had shaken his life and brought him to the
threshold of death, forgot those evidences of illness which marred the
once glorious beauty of the girl, forgot the black menace of the
future, forgot the wizard enemy whose hand was stretched over that
house and that garden--and was merely happy.

But this paroxysm of gladness--which Eliphas Levi, last of the Adepts,
has so marvellously analysed in one of his works--is of short
duration, as are all joys. It is needless to recount, here, the broken
sentences (punctuated with those first kisses which sweeten the memory
of old age) that now passed for conversation, and which lovers have
believed to be conversation since the world began. As dusk creeps over
a glorious landscape, so the shadow of Antony Ferrara crept over the
happiness of these two.

Gradually that shadow fell between them and the sun; the grim thing
which loomed big in the lives of them both, refused any longer to be
ignored. Robert Cairn, his arm about the girl's waist, broached the
hated subject.

"When did you last see--Ferrara?"

Myra looked up suddenly.

"Over a week--nearly a fortnight, ago--"

"Ah!"

Cairn noted that the girl spoke of Ferrara with an odd sort of
restraint for which he was at a loss to account. Myra had always
regarded her guardian's adopted son in the light of a brother;
therefore her present attitude was all the more singular.

"You did not expect him to return to England so soon?" he asked.

"I had no idea that he was in England," said Myra, "until he walked
in here one day. I was glad to see him--then."

"And should you not be glad to see him now?" inquired Cairn eagerly.

Myra, her head lowered, deliberately pressed out a crease in her white
skirt.

"One day, last week," she replied slowly, "he--came here, and--acted
strangely--"

"In what way?" jerked Cairn.

"He pointed out to me that actually we--he and I--were in no way
related."

"Well?"

"You know how I have always liked Antony? I have always thought of him
as my brother."

Again she hesitated, and a troubled expression