And now Bellingham changed the color and surface of his advances. It was his thought to make such a marvellous sally, that when he retired and the mistress once again commanded her own citadel, she would perceive the field of his activities strewn, not with corpses, but with garlands, and in their fragrance she must yearn for the giant to come yet again. The thing he now endeavored to do was beyond an ordinary human conception for devilishness; and yet, that it was not a momentary impulse, but a well considered plan, was proven by the trend of his talk of the day before.... The flaw in his structure was his apparent forgetting that the woman in his arms breathing so ardently, in her own mind was clinging to a youth out of the sunset--a youth in the skin of a lion. "Wisdom has been given to my eyes," Bellingham resumed with surpassing gentleness. "For years a conception of wonderful womanhood has lived and brightened in my mind, bringing with it a promise that in due time, such a woman would be shown to me. The woman, the promise and the miracle of its later meaning, I perceived at last were not for my happiness, but for the world's awful need. You are the fruits of my wonderful vision--you--Paula Linster. You are the quest of my long and weary searching!" His utterance of her name strangely disturbed her night-rapture of the desert. It was as if she heard afar-off--the calling of her people. "On the night you entered the Hall," he said, and his face bent closer, "I felt the sense of victory, before these physical eyes found you. My thoughts roved over a world, brightened by a new hope, fairer for your presence. And then, I saw your fine white brow, the ignited magic of your hair and eyes, your frail exquisite shoulders.... It seemed as though the lights perished from the place--when you left." The word "magic" was a sudden spark around which the thoughts of the woman now groped.... She had lost her desert lover, passion was drained from her, and there was a weight of great trouble pressing down ... "Magic"--she struggled for its meaning.... She was sitting upon a rock again, but not in the desert--rather in a place of cooled sunlight, where there were turf roads and grand, old trees--a huge figure approaching with a powerful swinging stride--yesterday, Bellingham, the Park--the Talk!... Paula lifted her shoulders, felt the binding arms around them and heard the words uttered now in the meridian of human passion: