for an instant.

"In a way," he answered, "I have. But I may not see much more. Most men
look back on life when they are old and wise, but I am doing it while
still young and perhaps the backward glance is the same in age or youth.
It's a summary."

"I don't understand half of what you are saying," she confessed a little
regretfully. It seemed to her from what she did grasp that the rest
would be well worth while.

"If it were otherwise," he laughed with a return of the whimsical glint
to his pupils and the little wrinkles about the corners of his eyes, "I
should not have said half of it. A good part of my conversation has been
in the manner of soliloquy. Hermits often talk to themselves. I shall
now say something else you won't understand. Wield leniently the
dangerous gift of your witchcraft--the freakish beauty of your perfect
unmatched eyes."

And all the way home Mary Burton walked on air, and the lonely woods
seemed to have grown of a sudden spicy and glorious. When she stole up
to the room under the eaves and looked again into the little mirror, she
did not turn away so unhappy as she had been. The brown eye dared to
meet the brown eye in the glass--and the violet eye, the violet.

Under her breath she repeated over and over, lest she forget some of its
polysyllables, a sentence which was half-incomprehensible to her, yet
which was sonorous enough and grandiloquent enough to impress her
deeply. At last, also lest memory prove illusive, she wrote the sentence
down: "Wield leniently the dangerous gift of your witchcraft--the