Doris was leaning toward him with her transparent face upturned, and he saw a sudden tender light tremble over its sweetness as dawning sunbeams run over rippling water, and--startled, fascinated, awed--he watched its deepening wonder, its growing radiance, its wondrous illumination, as the white curtain fell away from the lighted shrine of a spotless soul. There now followed an instant's tense waiting, with the girl's rose-red lips apart and a-quiver; with the starry darkness of her eyes softly aglow, as the evening star glows through the warm twilight; with her exquisite face sensitively alight, as the spring's tender new leaves stir, and dimple, and shimmer under a sudden shower of golden sunlight,--and then swiftly a shadow fell, as a wind-swept cloud covers the sun, sweeping all the quivering sunbeams out of sight. Unexpectedly as a swallow darts downward, Doris bent to gather up the forgotten braid of long green grass. Lifting it with a queer little laugh, she held it out to him with a movement which was almost mocking and wholly unlike her gentle self. Her dark eyes, grown suddenly very bright, seemed actually to be laughing at him. "Is this the kind of braids that the mermaids wear hanging down their backs?" she said, lightly. "No, I remember that their locks of seaweed flow loose, but I am sure that they are no greener than this." He took the braid and stared at it unseeingly, as if it had been in truth some such marvel as a mermaid's hair. He did not see that she hardly knew what she was saying. In a crisis such as this it is nearly always the woman who first recovers herself, no matter how young and innocent she may be, nor how wise the man in the ways of the world. And Lynn Gordon was young, too, and far from being wise--almost as far as Doris Wendall was. He knew little of women; he had not had experience to teach him the subtlety of the simplest feminine creature; he had forgotten for the moment that even the dove is artful enough to lure danger away from her love secret.