A strange feeling stole over him, the feeling of mystery that comes to one with some sudden apposition of incident that thrills with a sense of an overpowering meaning in a circumstance in itself banal and trivial. Something of her proud and passionate spirit she had etched into those lines. Might it be that spirit, somewhere in the great void, reached out to him through this silent witness--to say that love does not wholly die? He gently spoke her name. "Eleanor! You forgave me for writing--that. If you hadn't you wouldn't have left me this desk when you--died, away over there in Florence! So I've got your letter at last." He sighed again and groping for his big chair, sat down, with the sheet of paper spread out upon his knee. On the upper floor Mrs. Allen tapped lightly on Chilly's door and when there was no answer, opened it softly and entered. At the whisper of his name he started up in bed. "Duchess!" he exclaimed. The pet name, as always, touched her. It was a perennial tribute to that stateliness and dignity which she had made her own. She came and sat down on the edge of the bed and he caught her hand and held it to his lips. "You shouldn't have come," he chided. "You'll take cold." "I heard your father talking to you," she whispered. "You--you know what he dislikes so. Why can you not be--discreet?" Chilly moved uneasily: "Oh, I know," he said. "But I can't always be giving an imitation of a quaker meeting! I'm not a child." "You must not anger him," she said. "I--for my sake, I wish you would be more careful." He patted her hand. "All right, Duchess! I'll mind my p's and q's. But you must go back to bed now. Don't you worry about me." She bent down and kissed him on the forehead before she glided from the room. CHAPTER VII ARROWS OF DESIRE "Here is the new rose," said Echo. "Its name is the Laurant Carle." Cameron Craig looked--at her, not at the blossom. She was in simple white and as she stood there in the perfumed garden, vivid, elemental, tuned to the wonder and passion of living, her slim figure outlined against the dark green shrubbery and her face and gold-bronze hair touched with the slanting sunlight, she seemed herself some great, rare, golden flower in a silver sheath. Lines he had somewhere read sprang into his mind: "Bring me my bow of burning gold, Bring me my arrows of desire," and, contained man that he was, he caught his breath at the sudden leap in him of the thing that had been covered and hidden there so long, something fine and keen as flame, that set his habitually cool blood beating under his eyelids. "It was not the rose," he said. "I had another reason in asking you to come here." "Yes?" Her voice was evenly inquiring. "It was to ask you if you will marry me." She took a quick step backward; a look of amaze had sprung to her face. "I?" she exclaimed. "You want me to--_marry_ you?" "Yes. Is there anything strange in that?"