There was something very tender in their love for each other that evening. It was an hour that Gaspard never forgot for all the following years of his life. In his wife there was an almost unreal buoyancy of spirit in reaction from her depression of the morning, a subtle sweetness of charm, a delicate tenderness that brought back to him the early days of their betrothal when just to hear her speak, to watch the color come into her cheek, to catch the mystic, meaningful look in her eye, which he knew was for him alone, had been wont to work in him a joy beyond words to express, an exaltation of imaginative ecstasy which had power to turn Glasgow’s muddy streets and solidly dull tenements into “pathways of silver and palaces of gold.” Slowly they walked down the driveway, under the tall red pines which now were standing like rigid sentinels in the windless silence of the soft spring air. Far across the valley stood the distant mountains, now showing dark blue in clean-cut outline against a sky of wonderful, quivering liquid gold, and between the mountains and the bench of foothills on which stood their home lay the broad valley still deep in soft yellow sunshine reflected from the sky overhead, except where the shadows from the mountain peaks fell in long dark lances and where the masses of the pine tops showed a deep blue black. A hushed stillness had fallen upon the world, except for the exquisite notes of the meadow lark which now and then fell upon the silent air, liquid and golden, as from no other living bird in any known land. As they walked thus beneath the pines, holding each other’s hand like children, the sweet sad beauty of the dying day, the mystic silence of the wide valley at their feet, the deep shadow of the pines splashed with wide pools of gold, the liquid bell-like note of the bird, like a voice from another world, all together brought a great ease to strained nerves and tortured hearts. “It is a good world, Hugh, a dear, good world,” said his wife as they stood together drinking in with all their senses the beauty, the glory, the soft tender silence of the falling evening. “The best ever,” replied her husband, “if only——” “Oh, let’s have no ‘if’ today. I’ve had a wonderful afternoon. You’ve given me a wonderful afternoon, Hugh. I won’t forget it ever.” “Forget what?” “How good you are to me, Hugh,” she said. “Good to you? Good Lord! But I mean to be! I want to be! You can bank on that.” His voice grew uncertain. “I do, I do. I know it well,” she said. “And you will always believe that?” he asked with a strange intensity. “Always? No matter what comes?” He threw his arm about her. “Hugh, I believe you are making love to me.” She laughed happily. “God knows I am,” he said with emphasis. “And God knows that never will I do anything else than make love to you, so long as I live. I am really only beginning to love you.” “What? You dare to tell me that you have been deceiving me all these dozen years?”