"I think, Miss Willis," he said gently, " that you should have
told me this before."

"How could I?" begged the girl. "When could I have done it? Why
should I?"

"I do not know," he answered wearily; "only, perhaps it might
have spared me some shade of human anguish."

"Human?" asked Daphne, almost smiling.

"No, no, no," he interrupted, not hearing her. "It would not
have done any good, for I have loved you from the first minute
when l saw your blue drapery flutter in your flight from me.
Some deeper sense than mortals have told me that every footstep
was falling on my sleeping heart and waking it to life. You were
not running away; in some divine sense you were coming toward me.
Daphne, Daphne, I cannot let you go!"

The look in the girl's startled eyes was his only answer. By the
side of this sun-browned face, in its beauty and its power, rose
before her a vision of Eustace Denton, pale, full-lipped, with an
ardor for nothingness in his remote blue eyes. How could she
have known, in those old days before her revelation came, that
faces like this were on the earth: how could she have dreamed
that glory of life like this was possible?

In the great strain of the moment they both grew calm and Daphne
told him her story, as much of it as she thought it wise for him
to know. Her later sense of misgiving, the breaking of the