Wayland went to sleep to dream one of those dreams that envelop day with rain-bow mist. He dreamed that the amethyst gates of the sun had swung ajar flooding life with countless charioteers each carrying a golden spear, and as they advanced over the clouds to earth, all the little purple heather bells that had hung their heads during the night to keep out the dew, all the waxy chalices of the winter-greens pale and faint with passion, all the bells nodding to the wind, began ringing--ringing ten thousand golden bells; and the painter's brush, multicolored dazzling knee-deep in the Alpine meadows, flaunted countless torches of carmine flame to welcome back the day. Then, suddenly, it wasn't a sound of bells at all. It was her voice, her voice with the golden note and the liquid break that came when he had surprised Love in her eyes; and it wasn't the warmth of the Sun's fan-shaped shafts at all; it was the warmth of her lips in the face of the picture she had promised--the face above "the Warrior." When he awakened, a sprig of everlasting that he had stuck in the band of his Alpine hat had blown across his face. CHAPTER VI WHEREIN ONE PLAYS AN UNCONSCIOUS PART Watch a snow flake as it falls! Gentle is too rough a word for the motion. It floats, a crystal cob-web shot with the glint of sun-jewels; tangible but melting to your touch, evanescent and translucent as light; conceived of the wind that bloweth where it listeth and the gossamer clouds of a vague somewhere. Waveringly, noiselessly, so noiselessly it comes that you do not catch the rustling flutter with your ear, but with a sixth sense of motion. And it transforms, bewitches, beautifies what it touches. I suppose if such an evanescent thing were told that it and it alone had been the age-old, time-immemorial sculptor of the granite rocks; that it and it alone--to paraphrase the words of the scientists--had rolled away the door from the sepulchers of the eternal rocks and turned a planet into a sensate earth pulsing with growth--I suppose if a snow flake were told such heresy, it would die of its own amaze. This, _apropos_ of nothing in particular, unless you happen to understand from the catagory of your own experiences. It was her first love-letter; and, because she did not know she was writing a love-letter she wrote out of the fulness of an overflowing heart. Also the hour was the precise hour when consciousness of her presence had gone over Wayland in flood tides of fierce tenderness. That may have been a mere coincidence. I set it down because such coincidences daily touch life. Here is the letter. _Twelve O'clock_.