voice, "what you really are--yourself?"

She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her
growing inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran
like a shadow across her face.

"It seems to me,"--he faltered oddly under her gaze--"that I have some
right to know--"

Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. "You love me, then?" she asked
softly.

"I swear," he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising tide,
"I never felt before--I have never known any other girl who--"

"Then you _have_ the right to know," she calmly interrupted his confused
confession, "for love shares all secrets."

She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. Her words
lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed
almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death. He
became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was speaking
again.

"The real life I speak of," she whispered, "is the old, old life within,
the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once belonged, and to
which you still belong."

A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low voice
sank into him. What she was saying he knew instinctively to be true,