night. Hanging lights made emerald caverns in the
depths of foliage, and whitened the spray of a fountain falling among
lilies. The magic place was deserted: there was no sound but the splash
of the water on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of music that might
have been blown across a sleeping lake.

Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a
part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them
to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the
boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude
about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it
together. At length Lily withdrew her hand, and moved away a step, so
that her white-robed slimness was outlined against the dusk of the
branches. Selden followed her, and still without speaking they seated
themselves on a bench beside the fountain.

Suddenly she raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a child.
"You never speak to me--you think hard things of me," she murmured.

"I think of you at any rate, God knows!" he said.

"Then why do we never see each other? Why can't we be friends? You
promised once to help me," she continued in the same tone, as though the
words were drawn from her unwillingly.

"The only way I can help you is by loving you," Selden said in a low
voice.

She made no reply, but her face turned to him with the soft motion of a
flower. His own met it slowly, and their lips touched. She drew back and
rose from her seat. Selden rose too, and they stood facing each other.
Suddenly she caught his hand and pressed it a moment against her cheek.

"Ah, love me, love me--but don't tell me so!" she sighed with her eyes in
his; and before he could speak she had turned and slipped through the
arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the room beyond.

Selden stood where she had left him. He knew too well the transiency of
exquisite moments to attempt to follow her; but presently he reentered
the house and made his way through the deserted rooms to the door. A few
sumptuously-cloaked ladies were already gathered in the marble vestibule,
and in the coat-room he found Van Alstyne and Gus Trenor.

The former, at Selden's approach, paused in the careful selection of a
cigar from one of the silver boxes invitingly set out near the door.

"Hallo, Selden, going too? You're an Epicurean like myself, I see: you
don't want to see all those god