Into his eyes as he looked leaped a light like the flame of the sunshine beyond the shadows on the hill; swiftly he stepped forward and kissed the girl's shoulder where the thin yellow stuff of her dress showed the outward curve to the arm. She turned and faced him, without a word. There was no need of speech: anger battled with unconfessed joy in her changing face. "How dare you?" she said presently, when she had won her lips to curves of scorn. "The manners of the gods seem strange to mortals." "I love you," he answered simply. Then there was no sound save that of the water, dropping over the edge of the great basin to the soft grass beneath. "Can't you forgive me?" he asked humbly. "I am profoundly sorry; only, my temptation was superhuman." "I had thought that you were that, too," said the girl in a whisper. "There is no excuse, I know; there is only a reason. I love you, little girl. I love your questioning eyes, and your firm mouth, and your smooth brown hair"-- "Stop!" begged Daphne, putting out her hands. "You must not say such things to me, for I am not free to hear them. I must go away," and she turned toward home. But he grasped one of the outstretched hands and drew her to the stone bench near the fountain, and then seated himself near her side. "Now tell me what you mean," he said quietly. "I mean," she answered, with her eyes cast down, "that two years ago I promised to love some one else. I must not even hear what you are trying to say to me." "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 I 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?