"I--I am glad you love me, Kenny. It makes me very happy. But it is all so strange, so unreal. I can't seem to convince myself that it is right for you to love me or for me to love you. Some day, perhaps, it will all straighten itself out in my mind and then I will know whether it is love,--the kind of love you want,--or just a dear, sweet affection that I feel for you." "I understand," he said gravely. "It is too soon for you to know. A brother turned into a lover, as if by magic, and you are bewildered. I can only pray that the time will come when your heart tells you that you love me as I want you to, and as I love you." They spoke thus freely before the girl's mother, for those were the days when a man's courting was not done surreptitiously. It is doubtful, however, if they remembered her presence. "There have been times--" she began, a trace of eagerness in her voice, "when something seemed to tell me that--that I ought to keep away from you. I used to have the queerest sensations running all over--" She did not complete the sentence; instead, as if in a sudden panic over the nearness of unmaidenly revelations, she somewhat breathlessly began all over again: "I guess it must have been a--a warning, or something." "They say there is such a thing as a magnetic current between human beings," he said. "It was that, Viola. You felt my love laying hold upon you, touching you, caressing you." "The other night, when you held me so close to you, I--I couldn't think of you as my brother." Out of the darkness spoke Rachel Carter. "You love each other," she said. "There is no use trying to explain or account for your feelings. The day you came here, Kenneth Gwynne, I saw the handwriting on the wall. I knew that this would happen. It was as certain as the rising of the sun. It would have been as useless for me to attempt to stop the rising sun as to try to keep you two from falling in love with each other. It was so written long ago." "But, mother, I am not sure,--how can you say that I am in love with him when I don't know it myself?" cried Viola. "When you came, Kenneth, I knew that my days were numbered," went on the older woman, leaning forward in her chair. "The truth would have to come out. A force I could not stand up against had entered the field. For want of a better word we will call it Fate. It is useless to fight against Fate. If I had never told you two the truth about yourselves, you would have found it out anyway. You would have found it out in the touch of your hands, in the leap of the blood, in the strange, mysterious desire of the flesh over which the soul has no control. You began loving him, Viola,--without knowing it,--that night at Phineas Striker's. You--" "How can you say such a thing, mother?" cried Viola hotly. "I was in love with Barry Lapelle at that--" "You were never in love with Barry," broke in her mother calmly. "I think I ought to know when I am in love and when I am not!"