In deep natures there is always what one might call a lover's leap to be taken by those that would love them--something one cannot understand to be taken on trust, something even that one fears to be gladly adventured ... all this, and more, I knew that I could safely venture for Elizabeth's sake, ere I kissed her white brow and stole away in the early hours of that winter's morning. As I did so I had taken one of the sumptuous strands of her hair into my hand and kissed it too. "Promise me to let this come back to its own beautiful colour," I had said, as I nodded to a little phial labelled "Peroxide of Hydrogen" on her mantelshelf. "Would you like to?" she had said. "Yes, do it for me." One day some months after I cut from her dear head one long thick lock, one half of which was gold and the other half chestnut. I take it out and look at it as I write, and, as when I first cut it, it seems still a symbol of Elizabeth's life, the sun and the shadow, only that the gold was the shadow, and the chestnut was the sun. The time came when the locks, from crown to tip, were all chestnut--but when it came I would have given the world for them to be gold again; for Elizabeth had said a curious thing when she had given me her promise. "All right, dear," she had said, "but something tells me that when they are all brown again our happiness will be at an end." "How long will that take?" I had said, trying to be gay, though an involuntary shudder had gone through me, less at her words than because of the strange conviction of her manner. "About two years,--perhaps a little more," she said, answering me quite seriously, as she gravely measured the shining tresses, half her body's length, with her eye. CHAPTER III THE GOLDEN GIRL One fresh and sunny morning, some months after this night, Elizabeth and I stood before the simple altar of a little country church, for the news had come to us that her husband was dead, and thus we were free to belong to each other before all the world. The exquisite stillness in the cool old church was as the peace in our hearts, and the rippling sound of the sunlit leaves outside seemed like the very murmur of the stream of life down which we dreamed of gliding together from that hour. It was one of those moments which sometimes come and go without any apparent cause, when life suddenly takes a mystical aspect of completeness, all its discords are harmonised by some unseen hand of the spirit, and all its imperfections fall away. The lover of beauty and the lover of God alike know these strange moments, but none know them with such a mighty satisfaction as a man and a woman who love as loved Elizabeth and I.