In truth, she could not go; she had been too vitally stirred; she began to
tremble excessively, and sank back upon the bench, motioning him away with
vague gestures of her shaking hands.

This was more than the Incroyable had counted upon, and far from his
desires. He started forward with an exclamation.

"Don't come near me!" she gasped. "Who are you? Go away!"

"Give me one second to explain," he began; but with the instant
reassurance of this beginning she cut him off short, her fears dispelled
by his commonplace. Nay, indignation displaced them so quickly that she
fairly flashed up before him to her full height.

"You did not come in by the gate!" she cried. "What do you mean by coming
here in that dress What right have you in my garden?"

"Just one word," he begged quickly, but very gently. "You'd allow a
street-beggar that much!"

She stood before him, panting, and, as he thought, glorious, in her flush
of youth and anger. Tom Vanrevel had painted her incoherently, but richly,
in spite of that, his whole heart being in the portrait; and - Crailey
Gray had smiled at what he deemed the exaggeration of an ordinarily
unimpressionable man who had fallen in love "at first sight;" yet, in the
presence of the reality, the Incroyable decided that Tom's colors had been
gray and humble. It was not that she was merely lovely, that her nose was
straight, and her chin dexterously wrought between square and oval; that
her dark hair lay soft as a shadow on her white brow; not that the
trembling hand she held against her breast sprang from a taper wrist and