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were raised and gravely watched a bird that fluttered with a flash of gold from branch to branch in the woods. She did not smile; she was grave; but in the contemplative gravity he saw happiness, and knew now, and surely knew, that he had never before seen her happy. Presently the bird, like a winged flower tossed into the air, flew up—away—over the woods. Madeline's eyes followed it out of sight. Her long white hand, passing softly through the grass, seemed to love its supple warmth and smoothness; she sighed deeply, happily.

She was happy. She was part of the day, part of the sunlight, the grass, and the flying bird. In her tragic aspect she had frozen his heart; she melted it now; he could have wept for the pathos of her happiness. He still gazed—gazed at its revelation. He still stood at the edge of the wood, holding his breath, unable to think beyond the golden moment. But as if she felt that tears were near her, as if some echo of his forgotten fear came to her, or else from some deep sense of the contrast this lonely happiness made with her other loneliness,—the loneliness filled with alien faces,—Madeline dropped suddenly her head on her arms and wept and wept and wept.

Her grief was the final revelation that struck all memory of ghosts from him. He sprang to her, forgetting everything but her sorrow and his love for her.

"Madeline—Madeline!" he said, and bent over her. "Tell me what it is."

For a moment she lay there, her face hidden, her weeping hushed, as quiet as an animal surprised and feigning death. A quick seeing of his own words, to an almost unknown girl, as amazing—amazing perhaps to the point of insolence in her eyes—flashed over him; but the instinct that had made them inevitable did not leave him. Only as she slowly raised herself on an arm, her face bent downward, slowly rose to her feet, did the strong instinct begin to ebb from him. It had urged him almost to the infolding of her in his arms; but now he drew back from her.

Madeline raised her head and looked at him, and as she looked his love stormed in his heart, struggling and strangely mingling with a terror of her, greater and more appalling than any he had ever felt. She looked at him, and her eyes were full of a ghastly fear. He could not infold this nightmare figure, but he could hold his courage over the abyss where her eyes suspended it. "Tell me what is the matter with you. I will know—I will know!" he repeated sternly. When he spoke to her she retreated; she put out a hand to the nearest beech-tree and leaned against it.

"Why do you look at me like that?" In his effort to face her, Maverley's voice was fierce. "Answer me!" he demanded.

"I am afraid of you," said Madeline.

"Afraid of me?"

"You almost kill me with fear."

"Why? Why are you afraid?"

"I am afraid of everybody." She answered him as a ghost might have answered, in a voice monotonous and soft.

"Why are you afraid of everybody?"

"Because they hate to see me—they hate me. But you"—she shuddered—"you are worse than all the rest—worse than my father! I can't bear it!"

"We are both mad. It 's a madness that your fear creates. You hypnotize everybody into a dread of you. It 's absolutely a case of suggestion. Take hold of yourself; conquer it. The whole world will change to you if you will stop being afraid." Yet, as he spoke, his voice choked, for those eyes still looked—looked at him.

"I am not afraid when I am alone. Won't you leave me?"

What could love do when such terror met it, and when such terror was its home? It was like a flower rooted in a quicksand and shaken by a whirlwind. It lived, but it quaked from root to chalice; it lay upon the ground. Maverley turned from her. He went down the grassy knoll into the woods; and he, a man who had not wept for years, sobbed helplessly, angrily, his clenched hand at his forehead.

He must go next day. He could not face the disintegration of his courage—a courage so ready in all the normal crises of life; he could not face the madness that his torn mind menaced, the agony of his own craven helplessness before her awful need.

That was Maverley's conclusive thought, as he lay trying to sleep, on the night of the day that had crashed revelation after revelation upon him. Madeline's happiness, her sorrow, his love for her, her hideous fear of him, and his own more hideous fear that had answered it. For how could help—and a help weighted by such fear—reach her? All that she asked of life was