and sphere of action, all leading up to the true and only love of her
life. Well, what of that? He had always understood she had been married
before. Enwoven in the mesh-net of her scented hair, her soft cheek warm
and wet against his, all this talk seemed infinitely detached--the
insignificant problems of a former existence, long solved, prehistoric,
without interest. Then he spoke. He remembered well what he had said. It
was that to-morrow they twain, drawing apart from all the evil tongues
of the world, were to begin the old walk along the Sure Way of
Happiness. The world was not for them. A better life was to be theirs.
They would wander through noble and high-set cities. Italy, beloved of
lovers, waited for them. Her stone-pines beckoned to them. There he
would tell her about great histories, and of the lives of the knights
and ladies who dwelt in the cities set on the hills.

"I am so ignorant," Miriam Gale had said, pushing his head back that she
might look at his whole face at once. "I am almost afraid of you--but I
love you, and I shall learn all these things."

It was all inconceivable and strange. The glamour of love mingled with
the soft, fitful firelight reflected in Miriam's eyes, till they twain
seemed the only realities. So that when she began to speak of her
husband, it seemed at first no more to John Arniston than if she had
told him that her shoeblack was yet alive. He and she had no past; only
a future, instant and immediate, waiting for them to-morrow.

How many times did they not move apart after a last farewell? John
Arniston could not tell, though to content himself he tried to count.
Then, their eyes drawing them together again, they had stood silent in
the long pause when the life throbs to and fro and the heart thunders in
the ears. At last, with "To-morrow!" for an iterated watchword between