That night a telegram flashed over the wires, and thenceforth, on the great financial tide, the ship Day, Knight, and Company lowered its peak to none. The day crept through until evening, deepening into genuine heat, and Marguerite sat waiting for Mr. Raleigh to come and bid her farewell. It seemed that his plans were altered, or possibly he was gone, and at sunset she went out alone. The cardinals that here and there showed their red caps above the bank, the wild roses that still lined the way, the grapes that blossomed and reddened and ripened year after year ungathered, did not once lift her eyes. She sat down, at last, on an old fallen trunk cushioned with moss, half of it forever wet in the brook that babbled to the lake, and waited for the day to quench itself in coolness and darkness. "Ah!" said Mr. Raleigh, leaping from the other side of the brook to the mossy trunk, "is it you? I have been seeking you, and what sprite sends you to me?" "I thought you were going away," she said, abruptly. "That is a broken paving-stone," he answered, seating himself beside her, and throwing his hat on the grass. "You asked me, yesterday, if I confessed to being a myth," she said, after a time. "If I should go back to Martinique, I should become one in your remembrance,--should I not? You would think of me just as you would have thought of the Dryad yesterday, if she had stepped from the tree and stepped back again?" "Are you going to Martinique?" he asked, with a total change of face and manner. "I don't know. I am tired of this; and I cannot live on an ice-field. I had such life at the South! It is 'as if a rose should shut and be a bud again.' I need my native weather, heat and sea." "How can you go to Martinique?" "Oh, I forgot!" Mr. Raleigh did not reply, and they both sat listening to the faint night-side noises of the world. "You are very quiet," he said at last, ceasing to fling waifs upon the stream. "And you could be very gay, I believe." "Yes. I am full of exuberant spirits. Do you know what day it is?" "It is my birthday." "It is _my_ birthday!" "How strange! The Jews would tell you that this sweet first of August was the birthday of the world. "''Tis like the birthday of the world, When earth was born in bloom,'"-- she sang, but paused before her voice should become hoarse in tears. "Do you know what you promised me on my birthday? I am going to claim it." "The present. You shall have a cast which I had made from one of my mother's fancies or bas-reliefs,--she only does the front of anything,--a group of fleurs-de-lis whose outlines make a child's face, my face." "It is more than any likeness in stone or pencil that I shall ask of you." "What then?" "You cannot imagine?" "_Monsieur_" she whispered, turning toward him, and blushing in the twilight, "_est ce que c'est moi?_"