"Stay with me to the end!"

If she only would! If he could find her--find her in this warm, human
world, away from that ghastly border-land where they two met. For in
that hour he knew he loved--what? A woman or a ghost? A creature of
this world or a fantasy of the night? Wherever she was, whatever she
was, he loved her and he wanted her. And in that hour of his agony her
eyes had told that she loved and wanted him.

It was eight months before they met again. Varick's friends thought
him changed, and quite possibly he was. The insouciant boy of twenty-
eight had become a man, a sympathetic, serious, thoughtful man, still
given to sports and outdoor life, but more than all devoted to a
search which had taken him to no end of out-of-the-way European towns.
He was sleeping in one of these one night (not _the_ one, alas!--he
had not found that) when the veil, now so warmly welcome, fell for the
fourth time.

He was in an exquisite Italian garden, a place all perfume and May
breezes and flooding sunshine and overarching blue sky. As he entered
it he saw her coming to meet him, and he went forward to greet her
with his pulses bounding and a light in his eyes which no eyes but
hers had ever seen there. Even in that supreme moment the wonderfully
_real_ atmosphere of it all impressed him. He heard a dry twig crack
under his foot as he walked, and he recognized the different perfumes
of the flowers around him--the heavy sweetness of a few belated orange
blossoms, the delicate breath of the oleander, the reminiscent perfume
of the rose. Then their hands met and their eyes, and each drew a long
breath, and neither spoke for a moment. When Varick found words they