quick appreciation of some well-expressed and
worthy thought. Something within him stirred to sudden life--something
that no one else had ever reached.

He looked into her eyes and thought he had never looked into the eyes of
a woman before. She smiled--and he was sure it was the first time he had
ever seen a woman smile!

"I am wild to be at home again," she was saying, "fairly crazy for
America! How I love her big, broad, majestic acres--the splendid sweep
of her meadows--the massive grandeur of her mountain peaks--the glory of
her open skies! You too, I believe, are a wanderer on strange seas. You
can hardly fail to understand my longing for the homeland!"

"I do understand, Opal. I am on my first visit to your country. Tell me
of her--her institutions, her people! Believe me, I am greatly
interested!"

And he was--in _her_! Nothing else counted at that moment. But the girl
did not understand that--then!

For half an hour, perhaps, she lost herself in an eloquent eulogy of
America, while the Boy sat and watched her, catching the import of but
little that she said, it must be confessed, but drinking in every detail
of her expressive countenance, her flashing, lustrous eyes, her red,
impulsive lips and rounded form, and her white, slender hands, always
employed in the expression of a thought or as the outlet for some
passing emotion. He caught himself watching for the occasional glimpses
of her small white teeth between the rose of her lips. He saw in her
eyes the violet sparks of smouldering fires, kindled by the volcanic
heart sometimes throbbing and threatening so close to the surface. When
the eruption came!--Fascinated he watched the rise and sweep of her
white arm. Every line and curve of her body was full of suggestion of
the ardent and restless and impulsive temperament with which nature had
so lavishly endowed her. She was alive with feeling--alive to the
finger-tips with the joy of life, the fullness of a deep, emotional
nature.

It occurred to Paul that nature had purposely left her body so small,
albeit so beautifully rounded, that it might devote all its powers to
the building therein of a magnificent, flaming soul--that her inner
nature might always triumph. But Opal had never been especially
conscious of a soul--scarcely of a body. She had not yet found herself.

Paul's emotions were in such chaotic rebellion that the thunder of his
heart-beats mingled with the pulse hammering through his brain