"I may be mad, I may be dreaming," he cried, suddenly springing to his feet and confronting the woman he loved with eyes grown darker with the sudden intensity of his feelings. "I may be mad to risk forever losing a companionship which has become so great a part of my life, so vital to my whole existence. I may be dreaming to believe, or hope, that my longings can ever reach fulfillment. But I cannot help it. It is not in me to act otherwise. The soul-mate of a man either belongs to him, or is denied to him, as the great controlling forces ordain. For thirty-five years I have walked through life alone. I have seen no woman whose companionship I desired, or could desire, during all that time. Never once in all that time have the soul-fires in me been stirred. Never once have I longed for the warm heart of a woman to beat in unison with mine. Then came a night--a mentally black and dreary night--when the work seemed desolate, and existence a condition almost intolerable in the future. The darkest thoughts of my life passed through my hot brain that night; darker even than the thoughts during the darkest days of the great war. That moment was the one that preceded dawn--my dawn. "Ah, Vita," he went on, with deeper, more vibrant meaning. "That dawn came like the miracle of every other dawn. But, unlike the dawn which heralds mere sunrise, it heralded an eternity of beautiful dreams untouched by the bitternesses and contentions of the human day. It came with a voice out of the moonlit darkness. The voice of a woman, who, within a space of time almost negligible, had changed the despairing blackness of night to a--wonderful dawn." Ruxton turned from her and began to pace the narrow length of the room. It was an unstudied expression of the fierce fire which had leapt up in his passionate, Slavonic heart. Vita's eyes followed his movements, fascinated yet unseeing in the tumult which he had roused within her. For her his words, his sudden outburst, had reduced to concrete form all that gamut of feeling which had been hers from the moment of their first encounter. All unacknowledged, the latent power of this man's personality had absorbed her every feeling. He was the one out of all the world. His handsome head, his superb body, so strong, so perfectly poised, but above all that wonderful idealism which saw so clearly through the fog of sordid influences which clogged all real progress. Almost breathless she waited while he went on. He paused in his walk and abruptly flung out his arms.