light where the moonbeams played upon the water.

He had always thought her handsome, but to-night she was a fragment of
the night itself, with all its tenderness and its melancholy mystery.
He watched her slender figure as she reached forward, plucked a rose
and raised its petals to her lips--a full flown rose, wasting its last
hours of loveliness. She fastened it in her corsage and led the way to
a stone bench beneath an arbor at the end of the wall where she sat and
motioned to the place beside her.

The accord which existed between these two was unusual because of the
total difference in their points of view on life and the habits of
thought which made each the negative pole of the other. However
unusual Markham may have appeared to a person of Olga Tcherny's
training, he was not an unusual young man in the ordinary sense. He
had always taken life seriously, from the hour when as a clerk in a
broker's office he had started to work at night at the League in New
York, with the intention of becoming a painter. He was no more
serious than thousands of other young men who plan their lives early
and live them up to specifications; but Olga Tcherny, who had flitted
a zig-zag butterfly course among the exotics, now found in the meadows
she had scorned a shrub quite to her liking. Markham was the most
refreshingly original person she had ever met. He always said exactly
what he thought and refused to speak at all unless he had something to
say. Those hours in the studio when he had painted her portrait had
been hours to remember, sound, sane hours in which they had discussed
many things not comprehended in her philosophy, when he had led her by
easy stages up the steep path he had climbed until she had gained,
from the pinnacle of his successes, a vista of what had lain beneath.
Unconsciously he had drawn upon her mentality until, surprised at its