The girl bobbed her head--her quaint and childishly impetuous affirmative. She looked down at the hand holding her own, contemplating her small white fingers curled up now into a warm, round fist, and wondering at the completeness with which it was swallowed by his big palm. Suddenly unable to think quite clearly, she wondered at the new pulse in her throat, which beat and beat until it seemed not easy even to speak. "Then it--must be you, too," she faltered. "I wasn't sure, either, even when I knew it must be. I'd begun to believe that you hadn't forgotten--that you didn't care to. . . . Will you please say that you forgive me--please--for something over which I have been sorrier than you can know?" It was not more than a wisp of sound--that request. The words were stumbling, and very earnest, and not very hard to understand. Silence came again, broken only by the treble strains of violins beyond. Once, in that quiet, his eyes strayed to the small and round, and yellow object which she carried in the crook of one arm--a tiny papier-mache pumpkin strapped to two fuzzy mice in patent leather harness--but the pumpkin coach and tiny animals were not necessary to translate her costume to him. His eyes came back and clung to the velvety face of that slim Cinderella in bits of transparent slippers and shimmering, star-edged white, until even in spite of the gloom the girl recognized the change which had come creeping over his face. She saw it surge up in his eyes--the old undisguised wonder of the boy of ten years before, for which, until that instant, she had looked in vain--but it was a man's wonder of woman now, utter and absolute and all-enveloping. She caught her breath then; she touched her lips with a dainty tongue as though they had gone dry of a sudden. Involuntarily she stepped toward him, that single pace which she had fallen away. And above the tumult of her own senses she heard herself trying to laugh and realized how unsteady the effort was. "Then you do forgive me?" she breathed. "Do I--pass inspection? Do you like me--in my masquerade?" Steve answered her last question first and, lips parted, she listened, conscious of nothing save the words he was speaking. "There was never need of a fairy-godmother for you," he told her, his voice grave. "There was never need of a transforming miracle; you have been that, always, yourself. And you are not permitted to ask forgiveness from me, nor pardon. Men do not admit that there can be need of that, where they have worshiped, as long as I have worshiped you. You knew I was coming. . . . I've been coming ten years now. But you can never know, either, how long ten years can be."