to be gold again;
for Elizabeth had said a curious thing when she had given me her
promise.

"All right, dear," she had said, "but something tells me that when they
are all brown again our happiness will be at an end."

"How long will that take?" I had said, trying to be gay, though an
involuntary shudder had gone through me, less at her words than because
of the strange conviction of her manner.

"About two years,--perhaps a little more," she said, answering me quite
seriously, as she gravely measured the shining tresses, half her body's
length, with her eye.

CHAPTER III

THE GOLDEN GIRL

One fresh and sunny morning, some months after this night, Elizabeth
and I stood before the simple altar of a little country church, for the
news had come to us that her husband was dead, and thus we were free to
belong to each other before all the world. The exquisite stillness in
the cool old church was as the peace in our hearts, and the rippling
sound of the sunlit leaves outside seemed like the very murmur of the
stream of life down which we dreamed of gliding together from that hour.

It was one of those moments which sometimes come and go without any
apparent cause, when life suddenly takes a mystical aspect of
completeness, all its discords are harmonised by some unseen hand of
the spirit, and all its imperfections fall away. The lover of beauty
and the lover of God alike know these strange moments, but none know
them with such a mighty satisfaction as a man and a woman who love as
loved Elizabeth and I.

Love for ever completes the world, for it is no future of higher
achievement, no expectation of greater joy. It lives for ever in a
present made perfect by itself. Love can dream of no greater
blessedness than itself, of no heaven but its own. God himself could
have added no touch of happiness to our happy hearts that grave and
sunny morning. You philosophers who go searching for the meaning of
life, thinkers reading so sadly, and let us hope so wrongly, the riddle
of the world--life has but one meaning, the riddle but one
answer--which is Love. To love is to put yourself in harmony with the
spheral music of creation, to stand in the centre of the universe, and
see it good and whole as it appears in the eye of God.

Even Death himself, the great and terrible King of kings, though he may
break the heart of love with agonies and anguish and slow tortures of
separation, may break not his faith. No one tha