the agility of youth and fire. He was the final concentration of
the essence of Spanish passion filtered into an American frame;
she, a repressed Southern exotic, trying to fit itself into the
niches of a modern civilisation. Truly, a fitting couple to seek
the bayou banks.

They climbed the levee that stretched a feeble check to waters
that seldom rise, and on the other side of the embankment, at the
brink of the river, she sat on a log, and impatiently pulled off
the little cap she wore. The skies were gray, heavy, overcast,
with an occasional wind-rift in the clouds that only revealed new
depths of grayness behind; the tideless waters murmured a faint
ripple against the logs and jutting beams of the breakwater, and
were answered by the crescendo wail of the dried reeds on the
other bank,--reeds that rustled and moaned among themselves for
the golden days of summer sunshine.

He stood up, his dark form a slender silhouette against the sky;
she looked upward from her log, and their eyes met with an
exquisite shock of recognising understanding; dark eyes into dark
eyes, Iberian fire into Iberian fire, soul unto soul: it was
enough. He sat down and took her into his arms, and in the eerie
murmur of the storm coming they talked of the future.

"And then I hope to go to Italy or France. It is only there,
beneath those far Southern skies, that I could ever hope to
attain to anything that the soul within me says I can. I have
wasted so much time in the mere struggle for bread, while the
powers of a higher calling have clamoured for recognition and
expression. I will go some day and redeem myself."