In the constant attendance of men who chattered compliments she felt a haunting sense of pursuit and a secret impulse for flight, so that at the first opportunity she slipped away for the relief of solitude.

There were many vine-embowered retreats about the place where those who did not wish to dance might talk softly in the blue shadows of Grecian urns with star-shine and moon-mist for their tete-a-tetes. In such a place sat Mary Burton, alone--looking about her for a means of more secure escape. Her imagination kept disturbing her with the figure of a small girl whose home was a soon-to-be-abandoned farm. A yearning possessed her for the one thing which she could not command, the sort of romance that sweeps one away like a torrent. That little girl had yearned for the gifts of the world, for experience, wealth and adulation, because she fancied that out of these things came romance and its prize of happiness. The woman had them all--except the end of them all for which she had wanted them. They were dulled and tarnished by satiety and she still craved the coming of a lover whose forceful wooing should frighten and dominate her. Never in her life had she known any man upon whom she could not, with her trained self-reliance, set her own metes and bounds. Surely somewhere in the world there must be the sort of love-making that wrenches a woman out of her perfect self-composure and bears her away on its flood tide of power and passion. Perhaps she had been schooled and "finished" until humanity and its wonderful reality had, for her, ceased to exist. Suddenly she felt an upflaming of resentment against the generosity of her Napoleonic brother. In exchange for life's golden chance of romance she had been given a wonderful veneer of hard brilliancy--and she hated it! After a few moments of rebellious introspection she shook her head and rose from her seat, slipping behind the tall marble urn that rose from the end of the bench into the enveloping shadows. She was seeking a refuge where she might hide and hear the music softened by the distance and she kept walking, lured on by the wildness of the surrounding hills which just now better suited her mood than the clipped hedges.

She found a place at last from which, as one apart, she could look up at the stars and down at the dancers.

There was a larger crowd dancing now than there had been. Evidently new guests had arrived since dinner. She was beginning to feel the solace of her escape from other human beings when she became conscious of a white-clad figure approaching her, and gave a low exclamation of annoyance. Yet something in the manner of the man's movement indicated that he was, like herself, finding greater pleasure in solitude than in the dance. It was only when he was almost upon her that she stood out visible in the depth of the shadow. He halted then and bowed his apology.

"I beg your pardon," said a voice which struck a vaguely familiar chord of memory. "I didn't mean to intrude. I was just hunting for a spot where I could watch things without having to talk to anyone."

Mary Burton laughed.

"You don't have to talk to me," she assured him, "because, as it happens, that's why I'm here myself."

It was too dark for recognition of features, but there was a silvery quality in the girl's voice which piqued the interest of the newcomer and caused him to deviate from his avowed purpose of self-withdrawal. It seemed to him that music sounded across a space of years--music remembered and longed for.

"The dismissal is unmistakable in its terms," he answered. "Yet, since I have come a long way, may I not sit here for a moment of rest--provided I am very silent?"

Mary smiled and then quite unpremeditatedly she found herself inquiring, "A long way? Where do you come from then?"

"From St. Petersburg," he enlightened in a casual fashion, and after a moment he added, "to see you!"

"You just said you were seeking a place to be alone and why should you look for me whom you never saw before and whom you can't see now, for the dark? You don't even know what I'm like."

"I beg your pardon, Miss Burton.--There, you see I know your name."

The tantalizingly familiar note in his voice puzzled and interested her with a cumulative force. "I have a very definite idea what you are like.

Not being a poet, I'm afraid I can't put it into words."

"But you haven't seen me!" Her speech became for an instant mischievously whimsical. "Of course, if you have a burglar's lantern about you--or a match I suppose you might."

The man drew a small case from his pocket and struck a wax match, holding it close.

She met his gaze, and he stood motionless until the tiny blaze traveled down the length of the shaft and burned his fingers. His eyes never left her face. In those eyes she felt a strange power of magnetism, for they did not burn as other eyes had burned. They did not shift or waver. When the match fell he spoke quietly. "You are as beautiful as starlight on water and I am a true prophet."

In the brief and limited illumination she had recognized him, too, and she bent impulsively toward him. In his coming just now as though in answer to her thoughts there seemed something almost occult.

"Then you didn't die? You won your fight with your even chance? Oh, I am so glad!"

"Thank you," answered Jefferson Edwardes gravely. "That's worth refusing to die for."

"It's strange, Mr. Edwardes," she spoke almost dreamily. "Perhaps it's because I've been listening to the voice of the hills, but I have been sitting here alone--hiding--and while I've been here I've been thinking of you--wondering where you were."

"For that, too, I thank 'whatever gods there be,'" he assured her. "It has been a long time since we met and I was afraid you had forgotten. Of course, I've read of you and I knew that my prophecy was being fulfilled. Twice I planned to leave St. Petersburg and pursue you to London or Paris, but each time business matters intervened with their relentless demands."

"What made you think of me?" An eager sincerity sounded through the question. She was weary of compliments, but Jefferson Edwardes had a manner of simple speech which gave worth to his utterances.

"Once upon a time," he began with a low laugh, "there lived a singularly sickening little prig of a kid, pampered and spoiled to his selfish marrow. Though I hate to roast a small boy, I am bound to say that this one was pretty nearly a total loss--and he was I. He threatened to grow into a more odious man, but Providence intervened in his behalf--with disguised kindness. Providence threw him out by the scruff of his arrogant neck to fight for his life or to die--which was what he needed.

He went to your mountains to scrap with microbes--and he had leisure to discover what a microbe he was himself."

The girl's laugh was a peal of silvery music in the dark. "Were you a microbe?" she demanded. "All these years I've thought you a fairy prince." With a sudden gravity she added, "To one small girl, you opened a gate of dreams, and brought her contentment--" she broke off and the final words were almost whispered--"so long as they remained dreams."

"And now--" he took her up with grave and earnest interest--"now that they have become realities, what of them?"

"That comes later," she reminded him. "We aren't through yet with the little boy who won out with his fighting chance."

"When you knew him your hills had done something for him. They had humanized him. He went as one goes to exile, full of bitterness. Your hills were a miracle of wholesomeness. They cleansed and restored him with the song of their high-riding winds and the whispers of their pines. They confided to him those things that God only says to man in His own out-of-doors. Your mountains were good to me. I became something of a dreamer there, and in those dreams you have always stood as the personal incarnation of those hills. That is why I have thought of you unendingly ever since."

Mary Burton's answer was to shake her head and declare wistfully:

"I almost wish you hadn't seen me again. It would have been better if the illusion could have lasted."

"Since then," he went on, "the little girl has grown up and been crowned, but I shall prefer to think of her as she was before she knew she was to wear Cinderella's slipper."

"I wonder," she murmured, "if you can."

For a time they were silent while the dance music reached them softened by the distance, and then he inquired in a low voice:

"Do you by any miracle of chance remember an injunction I laid upon you one afternoon by the roadside?"

Mary Burton looked up and answered with a nod of her head. "Does any woman ever forget her first compliment?"

"What was it?"

"'Wield leniently the dangerous gift of your witchcraft--the--'" She abruptly broke off in the quotation and found herself coloring like a schoolgirl, so Jefferson Edwardes took up the injunction where she had left it incomplete. "The freakish beauty of your perfect, unmatched eyes," he prompted.

The girl felt a strange flutter in her breast. Just now she had blushed.

What had happened to the poise of her usual self-command? Some influence was abroad tonight or some hypnotism in those steady eyes that gave her a sense of vague apprehension. It was an apprehension though that thrilled her strangely with a welcome fear--and a promise. Tides were stirring that were all new tides. It was as though marvels were possible. She heard him saying again as he had said once before, "You are as beautiful as starlight on water."

"So was Cleopatra, my friend. So was Helen of Troy. So were ... Circe and Faustina."

"But they," he laughed, "did not wield kindly the power of their eyes."

Mary Burton winced, then she turned and faced him. Her voice trembled.

"Why did I have to meet you tonight? It isn't fair! They have schooled my brain into every useless vanity. They have fed my selfishness until it has strangled my heart. Never until today did I face the truth. All afternoon I've been sitting alone--hating myself. I am nothing but an artificial little flirt, and I have not obeyed your injunction." She paused, then hurried on with the forced manner of one resolved upon full confession! "Perhaps so far I've hurt only myself--but I've done that--mortally. Then you come and I learn that you've woven an illusion about me--and I destroy it."

Jefferson Edwardes smiled in the dark, but spoke gravely.

"You call yourself an artificial little flirt. You haven't flirted with me. Why?"

"With you I have talked ten minutes." She laughed suddenly as though at some absurd thought. "Besides, did any woman ever flirt with you? Can one lie to eyes that see through one?"

"My eyes do see something," he said. "They see that you have never had a chance to be your real self. You have been surrounded by flatterers and sycophants, when you needed sincere and truthful friends."

"Truthful friends!" She repeated the words after him incredulously. "I wonder if such things exist."

"I am one," he announced bluntly. "I am going to give back to you the message your hills gave me--without flattery and without adjectives."