raised a moment to his, full of love. He stooped forward, his breath swept her cheek, his lips touched hers, grew to them, in a passionate daring. Then, as wildly, he tore them off, and commenced walking the hall.

How long she waited, paled and flushed alternately in uncertainty, hope, and fear, Miriam did not know. She abode like a culprit, while her sentencer measured the tiles with his stride. The great tongue of the clock struck six, and only with its resonant clangor did his step cease.

"Miriam, Miriam," he murmured like one in a dream, "do you love me?"

"You know I do, Sir Rohan," she answered pathetically.

She felt him draw near, though she dared not see, felt his ardent smile, his outstretched arms, the embrace with which they held her; and silently, Miriam had found her costly kingdom.

And for Sir Rohan, all things were swallowed in the fruition of the moment. Life was sweet, he said; rest and joy. Life was Miriam.

XV.

THE TWO.

HE next week to Sir Rohan passed in a deliri

ous rapture; every hour with its blessings repaid him for a year's pain; and Miriam, crowning his ecstasy to-day with her sweet gravity, tomorrow with a triumph of wild and overflowing gayety, filled him at first with keen delight, and then with an alarm as exquisite, lest some sudden sorrow should fall and quench the flame. In her felicity he believed as fully as in his own.

St. Denys, glad as and more hilarious than they, left the lovers by themselves, and made arrangements for their departure, whose day he finally fixed.

When Sir Rohan considered his happiness, it appeared too great a thing to be true; and if Miriam left his side for a time, he feared lest it should prove some illusion that would shortly refuse to

deceive him. He felt himself again in the vernal

flood of youth, and cast not a thought on the dark tide between, for

"True love hath no powre

To Iooken backe; his eies be fixt before."

As for Miriam, she was more glowing, more radiant, than a Mænad. Her eyes flashed vivid lightnings all day; existence was to her like a sculptured frieze, a perpetual scene of never-varying enjoyment.

The contrast which they pre

sented was that between a picture blazing with gorgeous Venetian tints and another abounding only in quiet cinereous colors and stern outlines; but his tranquillity was as grateful to her as cool draughts from a rocky well to one in midsummer. Her life was full of salient points, each one beaked in sunshine. He was still and grave: she needed toning down. Their difference in age exceeded twenty years; nevertheless, he was still young, and that was all she was. At least, so Miriam felt.

As St. Denys saw them thus together, he remembered that in the midst of the fierce August heats that brood over a languishing land and sting out the red bells and pricking growth of

later summer, there sometimes comes a day that scents the fresh stir of advancing autumn, the clear air washing a cool retiring blue with frosty sparkles of vigor and hope, and all the earth turning, as it seems, to a new phase of fine and sweet maturity.

One asks what is this love that never palls, that, shift the kaleidoscope as you will, presents a new configuration. It must be the universal sympathy alone, you answer, which will not suffer it to tire. About ambition, jealousy, and crimes, the world varies; that age demands a good hater, this repudiates him. But Love is the flower of every age, and foreign to no clime. Is it any fable, the flower-juice dropped on sleeping lids? Is it not, rather, the fanciful expression of a broad truth? In what subtle atmosphere do lovers move, that, once breathed, intoxicates with all imaginative freaks of infatuation? What delicate ether is it that creeps from heart to heart to bathe both in one medium? Whence come the threads that knit each to the caprices of the other's slavery? What lodestone, what cynosure, with all magnetic secrets and latent force, equals the fearful and delicious attraction that draws either soul into eternal sub

jection and revolution. We know the secrets of the earth's magnetism, her currents, her poles, her meridians; we know nothing of this airy evanescence that flees at a glance, and baffles all our ponderous pursuit, yet swings a planet at its will, and is the Viceroy of creation. What wise magician shall ever come to read the ancient and mystical book of its lore, text and commentary, to translate to us the strangest of familiar things, the simplest of enchantments, the most terrible of blisses- to tell us what is Love. It is the crown of all experience, say its prophets. It is a fulness, an imperial largess from overflowing spirits, a wealth of joy like generous sunlight, a strength, a glory, an aureole, say its devotees. It is a void, a need, a pain, say its victims. And those who stand without, who see the dance and do not hear the music, — what more weird fantastic folly, the madness of the saturnalia, the sacred fury of eleusinian or evantian choir, ever dawns upon their dazzled darkness!

What drew these two (of whom the story tells) together, what made of them a single creature, with one wish, one thought, one life, nothing clearly defines; but no rod of divination is needed.