“Oh!” he heard her ejaculate, and he fancied that her color heightened a trifle. Transferring the ferns to her left hand, she swept toward him as lightly as if borne on a breeze, her right hand held out cordially. “I really wouldn't have known you, Paul,” she smiled, “if Uncle Jim had not told me you were here. Oh, I'm _so_ glad to see you!” As he held her soft hand it seemed to him that he was drawing self-possession and faith in himself from her ample store of cordiality. “I would have known you anywhere,” he heard himself saying, quite frankly. “And yet you have changed very, very much.” Thereupon he lost himself completely in the bewitching spell of her face and eyes. He had thought her beautiful as a little girl, but he had not counted on seeing her like this--on finding himself fairly torn asunder by a force belonging peculiarly to her. He marveled over his emotions--even feared them, as he stole glances at her long-lashed, dreamy eyes, witnessed the sunrise of delicate embarrassment in her rounded cheeks, and caught the ripened cadences of the voice which had haunted him like music heard in a trance. “You have changed a great deal,” she was saying, as she led him toward the spring. “A young man changes more when--when there really is something unusual in him. I was only a little girl when I knew you, Paul, but I was sure that you would succeed in the world. At least I counted on it till--” “Till I acted as I did,” he said, sadly, prompted by her hesitation. She looked at him directly, though her glance wavered slightly. “If I lost hope then,” she replied, “it was because I could not look far enough into the future. Surely it has turned out for the best. Uncle told me _why_ you came back. Oh, I think that is wonderful, wonderful! Till now I have never believed such a thing possible of a man, and yet I know it now because--because you did it.” He avoided her appealing eyes, looking away into the blue, sunlit distance. His lip shook when he answered: “Some day I'll tell you all about it. I'll unfold it to you like a book, page by page, chapter by chapter. It is a story that opens in the blackness of night and ends in the blaze of a new day.” “I know what you mean--oh, I know!” Ethel sighed. “The news of that night was my first realization of life's grim cruelty. Somehow I felt-- I suppose other imaginative girls are the same way--I felt that it was a sort of personal matter to me because I had met you as I had. I didn't blame you. I couldn't understand it fully, but I felt that it was simply a continuation of your ill-luck. I cried all that night. I could not go to sleep. I kept fancying I saw you running away through the mountains with all those men trying to catch you.” “So you didn't--really blame me?” Paul faltered. “You didn't think me so very, very bad?”