fingers together, and her voice thickened and stopped.

Her beauty, as she pushed her plate aside and leaned toward him,
was so startling that Peter, a lighted match half-raised to a
fresh cigarette, put the match down aimlessly, and looked
thoughtfully at the cigarette, and laid that down, too, without
the faintest consciousness of what he was doing. The day was warm,
and there was a little dampness on her white forehead, where the
gold hair clung to the brim of the drooping hat. Her marvellous
blue eyes were ringed with soft violet shadows, as if a sooty
finger had set them under the dark brown arch of the brows. The
soft curve of her chin, the babyish shortness of her upper lip,
and the crimson sweetness of the little earnest mouth had never
seemed more lovely than they were to-day. She was youth incarnate,
palpitating, flushed, unspoiled.

For a moment she looked down at the table, and the colour flooded
her face, then she looked him straight in the eyes and smiled.
"Well! Perhaps it will all work out right, Peter," she said, with
the childish, questioning look that so wrung his heart. She
immediately gathered her possessions together to go, but when they
stepped into sunshiny Geary Street it was three o'clock, and Peter
suggested that they walk down to the boat.

To them both the hour was memorable, and the street and park and
the tops of tall buildings, flooded with the sunlight of a summer
afternoon, were Paradise. Cherry only knew that she felt strangely
thrilled and yet at peace; Peter's heart was bursting with love of
the world, love of this romantic city, with its flower market
blazing in the sun, and with the ferry clock tower standing high