ged into one sweet
dream so secret, so sacred that she scarce dared own it to her own inner
self, and its central figure was her father's handsome assistant editor,
who rested in blissful ignorance of the havoc he was making in her
maiden heart, engrossed as he was in his own secret--his own romance.

New energy, new zest, new life seemed to have entered his blood. He had
endless capacity for work as well as for pleasure and could write all
day and dance half the night and then lie awake star-gazing the other
half and rise ready and eager for the day's work in the morning. Such a
tonic--such a stimulant did his love for his faraway bride and his
consciousness of her love for him prove.

He was happy--very, very happy, but he desired to be happier still. The
simple, beautiful words of the old, old rite uttered in the dim, empty
church had woven an invisible bond between him and the maiden whom he
loved to call in his heart his wife though the time when he could claim
her before the world was not yet.

The miracle that this bond wrought in him was a revelation to him. Was
the priest a wizard? Did the words of the ancient rite possess any
intrinsic power of enchantment undreamed of by the uninitiated?

He had not believed it possible for mortal to love more wholly--more
madly than he had loved the little Virginia before that sacred ceremony,
but after it he knew there were heights of love of which he had not
hitherto had a glimpse. Just the right to say to his heart "She is my
own--my wife--" made her tenfold more precious than she had ever been
before, but it also made the separation tenfold harder to bear--made it
beyond his power to bear!

The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass had been dissolved--the spell that
had brought it into being broken, by the separation, and he longed with
a longing that was as hunger and thirst to reconstruct this magical
world in which he and his Virginia dwelt apart with her who was mother
to them both, in Richmond. And so, poor as he was, he arranged to bring
Virginia and Mother Clemm to Richmond and establish them in a boarding
house where he could see them often and wait with better grace the still
happier day of making his marriage public.

The day came more speedily than they had let themselves hope. The
popularity of the _Messenger_ and the fame of its assistant editor had
grown with leaps and bounds. The new year brought the welcome gift of
promotion to full editorship, with an i