capable of larger issues--of higher heights
and deeper depths--than any woman he had ever known. She puzzled him
into a sympathy which quickened with each fresh instant of uncertainty,
and it seemed to him, while she moved by his side, that the illusion of
mystery was the one perennial charm a woman could possess--a mystery
which lay not only in the flame and shadow of her expression, but in the
intenser irregularities of her profile, in the curved darkness of her
eyebrows, in the fulness of her mouth, in the profound eloquence of her
eyes, in the pale amber of her skin, which was like porcelain touched by
a flame, in her gestures, in her walk, in her delicate bosom and slender
swaying hips, in her voice, her hands, her words, and in the blackness
of her abundant hair braided low upon the nape of her slender neck. And
this illusion--stronger than the illusion of beauty because more subtle,
more tantalisingly inexplicable, caught and held his attention with a
vivid and irresistible appeal.

At his words she had turned toward him with an animated gesture, while
her hand in its white glove slipped from the large muff she held.

"It would be a poor memory that could not hold three days," she laughed.

"Three days?" He raised his eyebrows with a blithe interrogation which
lent a peculiar charm to his expression. "Why, I thought that I had
known you forever!"

She shook her head in a merry protest, though she felt herself flush
slowly under the gay deference in his eyes.

"Forever is a long day. There are few people that it pays to know
forever."

"And how do you know that you are not one of them--for me?" he asked.

"How do I know?" she took up the question in a voice which even in her
lightest moments was not without a quality of impassioned earnestness.
"The one infallible way of knowing anything is to know it without really
knowing how or why one knows. My intuitions, you see, are my deeper
wisdom."

"And what do your intuitions have to say in regard to me?"

"Only," she responded, smiling, "that it would be dangerous for us to
attempt an acquaintance that should last forever."

"Dangerous!" the word excited his imagination and he felt the sting of
it in his blood. "What harm do you think would come of it?"

"The harm that always comes of the association between opposites," she
answered quickly, and the laughter, he was prompt to notice, had died
from her voice, "the harm of endless disagreements, of lost illu