"It is too lovely for mere words," murmured Gerald, gazing at all this beauty, with his poetical feelings uppermost. "Are you speaking of me?" asked Mavis joyfully. He laughed. "In spite of your seclusion, my dear, you are a true woman, for you will not allow even the landscape to be complimented when you are present." "Human beings are so much nicer than landscape," she pouted. "One is, at least. I wonder who she can be." "Me," said Mavis triumphantly. "How clever of you to guess that, my angel." Mavis flung up her arms with a silvery laugh. "I am a fairy to-night, and no angel. They are stiff things with goose wings." "Rhyme and reason both together," said Gerald, sitting down on a mossy stone fronting a smooth greensward. "Well, then, you are Titania, and I the rash mortal who has intruded on your privacy." "Take care that I do not enchant you, poor mortal." "You have done that already. Hark!" he raised a finger, "the wind is rising, your Majesty." "To play for my dancing." Then Gerald saw a wonderful thing. While the wind played with viewless fingers on the lyre of the surrounding woods, Mavis danced to the rhythm in exact unison with the gentle breaths which came and went. She bent her golden head to listen critically to the murmurings, and swung and swayed and floated to the melody of Nature. Her feet and arms scarcely moved, her slender body was almost still, yet by subtle movements she contrived to interpret the meaning of the hour. A low, low note from the tree-tops would send her floating across the grass: a pause would bring her to a statue stillness, and a dying sigh, as the wind lost heart, stirred her limbs to gentle movements, like the tremblings of a flower on its stalk. Poised gracefully in the radiant light, in her white garb, and with her mystical gestures timed to the Nature sounds, she looked like a spirit of the woods. Gerald faintly grasped for one fleeting moment the idea of the sacred dances of old, when every gesture and every pose was a sign of power to draw down the hierarchy of heaven to the physical plane. Then the wind died away, and the golden notes of the nightingale fluted through the trees. One bird trilled wild music, and another replied with a scattering of liquid notes like falling rain. All the marvelous enchantment of the night was in that speechless song, and the young man's heart beat in measure with the pulse of Nature. He rose abruptly to his feet, and when Mavis floated within the circle of his arms they went round her passionately. Like a tamed bird she rested on his heaving breast, and looked up smilingly into his brown eyes. Mavis read therein all that the wind and the nightingale had been trying to tell her, and when the man's lips were pressed ardently to her own she felt as though she had stepped from the twilight of unformed things into the glory of sunlight and song. "Oh," she panted, nestling to his heart, "what does this mean?"