“It's odd,” he said, speaking slowly, “how like a magnet drawing a steel bar you've drawn me down here. Pull-pull-pull--an irresistible force. I wonder if the magnet feels the attraction, too? Could it pull so hard if it didn't?” There was a long minute during which neither stirred--it might have been the counterpart of that minute, months back, when they had first observed each other. Recognition it was, perhaps, at the very first; there could be no question about the recognition now--it went deep. Suddenly he slipped his right arm out of the sling. Before she could draw breath she was in the circle of his arms, but he had not touched her. “Am I wrong?” he was saying. “Has it pulled both ways from the first?” It must be as useless for the magnet to resist as for the bar. And when they, have come within a certain distance of each other-- If Red Pepper's left arm caught her in the stronger grasp, the right did all, and more than all, that could have been expected of it. It was his right arm which slowly drew her hands up, one after the other, and indicated to them that their place was locked together, behind his neck. An old garden in South Carolina is a place to lure the Northerner out-of-doors. Before breakfast next morning Burns was walking down the box-bordered paths, feasting his gaze and his sense of fragrance on the clumps of blue and white violets, the clusters of gay crocuses, the splendid spikes of Roman hyacinths. But he did not fail to keep track of all doorways in sight, and when she appeared at the open French window of the drawing-room he was there in a trice, offering her a bunch of purple violets and feasting his eyes upon her morning freshness. “I'm still dreaming, I think,” said he when he had drawn her back into the quiet room long enough to satisfy himself with the active demonstration that possession means privilege, and had himself fastened the violets in the front of her crisp white morning dress. “Dreaming that I can stay down here in this wonderful paradise with you and not go back to the slave's life I lead.” “You would never be happy away from that slave's life long, you know,” she reminded him. “The rush of it is the joy of it to you.” “How will it be to you? I shall be yours, you remember, till Joe Tressler or any other ne'er-do-weel wants me, then I'm his.” “But you'll always come back to me,” said she. “And will you be content with that?” “So long as you want to come back.” He looked steadily into her eyes, and his own took fire. “Want to come back! I've waited a long time to find the woman I could be sure I should always want to come back to. I thought there would never be such a woman: not for an erratic fellow like me.... But now I'm wondering how I shall ever be able to stay away.” CHAPTER XIV. IN WHICH HE DEFIES SUPERSTITION “Hades of Hymen! Red, are you making calls this morning?” “Why not? I'm not to be married till noon, am I?”