Somehow the deep musical voice and her name pronounced as nobody else ever could pronounce it, and the big manly form and brave face, all seemed to complete the spell of the sunset hour. Elinor did not speak, but with a smile made room for him beside her at the window, and the two looked long at the deepening grandeur of the heavens and the misty shadows of heliotrope and silver darkening softly to the twilight below them. “And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day,” Victor said at last. “Your voice grows richer with the passing years, Victor,” Elinor said softly. “I wanted to hear it again the first time I heard you speak out there one September day.” “It is well to grow rich in something,” Victor said, half-earnestly, half-carelessly. Before Elinor could say more, they caught sight of Professor Burgess and Dennie Saxon, leaving the front portico as they had done on the May evening before the assault on Dr. Fenneben. Burgess and Dennie usually left the building together this year. “Is n't Dennie a darling? Elinor said calmly. “I guess so,” he replied. “I don't just know what makes a girl a darling to another girl. I only know”--he was on thin ice now--“and I don't even know that very well.” They turned to the landscape again. The whole building was growing quiet. Footsteps were fading away down the halls. Doors clicked faintly here and there. Somebody was singing softly in the basement laboratory, and the sunset sky was exquisitely lovely above the quiet gray December prairies. “It is too beautiful to last,” Elinor said, turning to the young man beside her. “The joy of it is too deep for us to hold.” She did not mean to stay a moment longer, for all the scene could be hers forever in memory--imperishable!--and Victor did not mean to detain her. But her face as she turned from the window, the hallowed setting of time and opportunity, and a heart-love hungering through hopeless, slow-dragging months, all had their own way with him. He put out his arms to her and she nestled within them, lifting a face to his own transfigured with love's sweetness. And he bent and kissed her red lips, holding her close in his arms. And in the shadowy twilight, with the faintly roseate banners of the sunset's after-glow trailing through it, for just one minute, heaven and earth came very near together for these two. And then they remembered, and Elinor put her hand in Victor's, who held it in his without a word. Out in the hall, Trench with soft lazy step had just come to the study door in time to see and turn away unseen, and slowly pass out of the big front door, whistling low the while: My sweetheart lives on the prairies wide By the sandy Cimarron, In a day to come she will be my bride, By the sandy Cimarron.