The girl's laugh was a peal of silvery music in the dark. "Were you a microbe?" she demanded. "All these years I've thought you a fairy prince." With a sudden gravity she added, "To one small girl, you opened a gate of dreams, and brought her contentment--" she broke off and the final words were almost whispered--"so long as they remained dreams."
"And now--" he took her up with grave and earnest interest--"now that they have become realities, what of them?"
"That comes later," she reminded him. "We aren't through yet with the little boy who won out with his fighting chance."
"When you knew him your hills had done something for him. They had humanized him. He went as one goes to exile, full of bitterness. Your hills were a miracle of wholesomeness. They cleansed and restored him with the song of their high-riding winds and the whispers of their pines. They confided to him those things that God only says to man in His own out-of-doors. Your mountains were good to me. I became something of a dreamer there, and in those dreams you have always stood as the personal incarnation of those hills. That is why I have thought of you unendingly ever since."
Mary Burton's answer was to shake her head and declare wistfully:
"I almost wish you hadn't seen me again. It would have been better if the illusion could have lasted."
"Since then," he went on, "the little girl has grown up and been crowned, but I shall prefer to think of her as she was before she knew she was to wear Cinderella's slipper."
For a time they were silent while the dance music reached them softened by the distance, and then he inquired in a low voice:
"Do you by any miracle of chance remember an injunction I laid upon you one afternoon by the roadside?"
Mary Burton looked up and answered with a nod of her head. "Does any woman ever forget her first compliment?"
"'Wield leniently the dangerous gift of your witchcraft--the--'" She abruptly broke off in the quotation and found herself coloring like a schoolgirl, so Jefferson Edwardes took up the injunction where she had left it incomplete. "The freakish beauty of your perfect, unmatched eyes," he prompted.
The girl felt a strange flutter in her breast. Just now she had blushed. What had happened to the poise of her usual self-command? Some influence was abroad tonight or some hypnotism in those steady eyes that gave her a sense of vague apprehension. It was an apprehension though that thrilled her strangely with a welcome fear--and a promise. Tides were stirring that were all new tides. It was as though marvels were possible. She heard him saying again as he had said once before, "You are as beautiful as starlight on water."