"I thought I knew you, Nan, but this is a revelation. I could never have guessed by the wildest leap of my imagination. It's beyond belief."

"Don't you like it?" she asked, with a hurt expression.

"I'm stunned. The most wonderful thing to me in the room, though, is not the bedstead, but the woman standing beside it."

A flash of light came from the dark eyes and the magnificent figure grew tense for a moment as she smiled with a look of inquiry.

"I'm lost in wonder at the riotous glory of your capacity for sensuous joy. I could imagine Juno on the heights of Olympus executing such a dream of mad luxury, but I could never have conceived of this, here, if I had not seen it. And yet, now that I see you in the setting, I'm sure you were made for it. The whole scheme is harmonious--it scares me----"

"Scares you?" she repeated with quick displeasure.

"Yes," he went on, jokingly. "It almost reconciles me to being a bachelor."

A look of pain swept the expressive face and he was sorry he had said it. The joke seemed out of harmony with her mood. She had taken herself seriously in the creation of this room, and had spent on it a round million. The effect it had produced on the man's mind was anything but flippant. He dared not tell how deeply he was moved, how every desire had awakened into fierce, cruel longing as the subtle scheme of sensuous dreaming had unfolded itself before his eyes. He began to wonder whether there were really any complexity or any mystery at all about her, whether she were not very simple and very elemental.

The picture she made standing in this wonderful room was one that never faded from his memory. The poise of her superb form; the fires that smouldered in the depths of her eyes; the tenderness with which her senses seemed to drink in the daring luxury; the smile that played about her lips, joyous, sensuous, cruel!

In vivid flashes he saw in her shining face the record of it all--the naked African hunters, crawling through forest jungles, stalking and bringing down in pools of blood the huge beasts who paid their tribute to her beauty; the army of toiling artists who bent their aching backs for days and weeks and months and years, carving the pictures in those white shining surfaces to please her fancy; the bowed figures of the weavers in Lyons and Brussels, these deft fingers working into matchless form the costly fabrics to please her eye and soothe the touch of her fingers as she drew back her curtains of purple and gold to let in the morning sunlight!

He wondered vaguely what such a woman, clothed with such power, would do if suddenly thwarted in a wish on which her heart was set?

And then it swept over him that she was no strange Egyptian princess, no sorceress of the Nile, no fairy of poet's fancy, but just the girl he had loved and lost and yet who had come back into his life in the dazzling splendour of her own day-dreams--one of the rulers of the world. He looked at her a moment and she seemed a being of another planet. He looked again and saw the laughing school-girl, his playmate on the red hills of his native state.

"Why so pensive, Jim?" she asked.

"It seems all a dream, Nan," he answered. "I'll rub my eyes and wake up directly. I thought your New York house a miracle. This is fairyland."

"Perhaps it would be," she said, looking at him a moment through half closed eyes, "if only the prince----"

A look of pain unconsciously clouded his face and the sentence was not finished.

CHAPTER VII

THE LAND OF THE SKY

On the fourth day Nan planned a coaching party to ascend Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the Land of the Sky, the highest point of ground this side the Rockies. She had taken this trip with Stuart sixteen years before. She was then but fifteen, and he had just begun to dangle at her heels. She did not tell him their destination, but left him to discover for himself that they were travelling over the same old quiet road.

The party consisted of half a dozen boys and girls whom Nan was chaperoning, Stuart, the footman and coachman. The start was made at sunrise. The morning was glorious, the air rich with the full breath of a southern spring. The footman lifted the bugle to his lips, and its music rang over the hills and broke into a thousand echoes as its notes bounded upward from cliff to cliff. The whip cracked over the back of four sleek horses and they were off, amid screams of laughter from the youngsters.

Stuart felt his heart leap with the joy of youth. The rivers and mountains, birds and fields of his native heath were calling once more, and his soul answered with a cry!

At the foot of the first hill the coach suddenly stopped beside the banks of the Swannanoa River.

Nan leaped to the ground, drew Stuart with her to the rear of the coach, and raised her arms.

"Lift me up," she cried, laughing.

He placed his hands under her arms and with a leap and a cry of laughter she was in the empty baggage rack.

"Now up with you!" she cried.

In a moment Stuart was seated snugly by her side and the big red coach was rolling along the old road beside the banks of the laughing river.

"Now, sir," Nan whispered, "do you know where you are going?"

Stuart nodded.

"Where?" she asked, mischievously, as she laid her warm hand with a sudden grip on his.

"To a certain peak among the clouds, where you and I once went a thousand years ago."

Nan nestled a little closer--or perhaps it was the swaying of the coach that made him think she did--and softly said:

"You remember this road?"

"I've seen it a hundred times in my dreams since that wonderful day. It winds along the banks of the Swannanoa for twenty miles, always climbing higher and higher until the river becomes a limpid trout stream. We stop at the old road-house, stay all night, and next morning take the bridle path with the funny pack-horses and climb to the first mountain top, still following the little stream. We stoop to drink from the spring which is the river's source--a deep bold spring hung with long festoons of green moss and set with ferns and rhododendron----"

"Fine, Jimmy, fine!" she cried with girlish mockery. "Your geography lesson was perfect! You can walk home with me after school."

Stuart looked at her and broke into a laugh. Again they were boy and girl, and the only change he could see was that she was more splendidly beautiful at thirty-one than she had ever promised to be at fifteen.

The spirit of joy was resistless. He flung to the winds the last shred of conventional dignity as the coach rolled lazily over the rocky road, throwing them from side to side.

"You remember how shocked you were in this same seat, Jim, that day in the sweet long ago when the old coach threw me into your arms?"

"Yes, I felt that I was taking a mean advantage of you."

"I blushed furiously, didn't I?"

"Yes, and I wonder now what your real thoughts were; you don't remember, I suppose?"

"As distinctly as though it were yesterday," Nan answered, dreamily.

"What did you think of my embarrassment?"

"I thought you were an awful fool not to accept more gracefully and thankfully the providence which threw a pretty girl your way."

The coach gave a sudden lurch and threw her into Stuart's arms again.

"And now?" he cried, laughingly, as he held her firmly for a moment, to prevent her falling.

She blushed furiously, threw the ringlets of dark hair from her face and drew back to her position.

"Now, of course, it's unlawful," she answered with sober playfulness.