did. He only knew that, gazing deep into her face, he saw the blood die

out and an expression come as though she would cry aloud. He knew that she dropped the book and half-raised her arms toward him.

A man’s brain may play queer pranks in life’s Great Moments. Came to Nathan then some lines he had written long ago, even as it was coming to the woman, intuitively, subconsciously, that both of them, in some far, previous incarnation had met so, had stood so, had spoken so,—long before.

“... the toil and tears we may know, dear heart, Must some day reach an end; Through miles and years we must search sometimes, Ten thousand for one friend. Yet some great noon in the sun-glare bright, In some vast, open space, You’ll stand, flesh-clothed, with your arms outstretched, And triumph on your face.

“I know few words will be needed then, Lament nor name nor plea, We’ll let our eyes speak the message sweet; ‘Grow old along with me!’ The soul of man has a thousand lives, Yet Love has only one, That leaps alive to the Glory Cry: ‘Dear Heart, the trek is done!’”

Nathan had builded better than he ever knew. It was his!—and hers!—that noontime. The trek was done.

Madelaine’s eyes were starry, starry as they had never been before in all her days. This copper-hued, clear-eyed, lean-jawed, firm-voiced man was Nathaniel Forge! This was the one who had written a little poem which she had folded away in lavender and old lace and placed in a little casket deep beneath her Inner Shrine, turning piteously from the poignant fantasy that it could possibly have been meant for her.

Romance? What was Romance? _This_ was Romance! This was Romance—the height and the depth and the width and the breadth of it—idealism unfathomable—the most beautiful thing in the world.

On a thousand nights in her orphaned heart she had wondered what he could be like, how he could appear, how his voice might sound. But that wonder had been forcibly sent away, off to the mystic vales behind the sunset where all our little unborn wishes go. Kismet, however, could be kind. This was a world after all in which action and reaction could be equal. There were still rewards and fairies. The man of her little heart-locked romance stood before her in the flesh at last. And he was all that she had ever dreamed a man could be and more.

Yes, it was all there,—all there on his face.

“Let us walk together, you and I,” said Madelaine, when her heart throbbed again and the great cog-wheels of the universe turned once more.

But in the woman’s suggestion lay a far deeper significance than Nathan grasped at the time.

IV

They fell into step and moved off, side by side, across the stubble. The sunshine sang and the breezes rioted. What mattered it that they stood in a land of blood and junk and chaos, with war roaring across the horizons and all the world on fire? There was a cobalt sky above them and the world stretched true into the western Infinite. It was a long way to the horizon, a very long way.

“Miss Theddon,” said Nathan, “life is very queer at times, isn’t it—in some of its coincidences and dénouements, I mean?”

“Yes,” replied Madelaine, scarcely recognizing her own voice. She was trying to credit that this romantically garbed, erect-figured, firm-footed, steady-voiced man by her side was Nathaniel Forge. She felt rather light-headed about it. She did not note just where they were walking. She did not care. There was a sky and it was blue. There was sunshine and it flooded over them. There was a horizon, and as they walked, it moved even farther away.

“Because, Miss Theddon, this doesn’t happen to be the first time I’ve seen you, I believe, though I dare say you never knew. Some day I’d like to tell you. Not now. Please don’t ask it. But somehow I feel I know you very well, that I’ve always known you.” He laughed lightly. “After all, Massachusetts and Vermont are very close together, aren’t they?”

How could she tell him? Could she tell him? She heard herself speaking, as though she were a third person, listening to the conversation.

“And I feel that I know you too very well indeed. Though I’m not yet quite over the shock of meeting you, away off here in the heart of Asia. You—you wrote a poem once——”

He lost a step in his abrupt surprise. Then he recovered himself.

“While I was seventeen I had a period when I wrote a few rhymes, yes,” he affirmed. “Every fellow does, I fancy. Only some write them worse than others.”

“One of those poems happened into my possession. I found it in a newspaper. It—it—interested me. I kept it. I wondered who you were and—why you should have written such a poem.”

“Which poem was it? I wrote several.”

“I’ll tell you that—some day—when you tell me where you saw me before,” she answered. It was sincerely spoken, not coquetry.

“We find we know one another and we meet out here! It is almost too much to credit.”

On the mellow brown steppe they were two figures silhouetted against the sky, a bronzed man in khaki and a beautiful woman in blue and scarlet. They were walking rather close together.

In the far distance sounded a long-drawn whistle—the east-bound freight. They had to return. But their Amethyst Moment had slipped into Memory!

V

“Look here, Forge,” cried a young surgeon angrily, when he came through the train a quarter-hour later, “what the devil did you say to that Theddon girl that she should come back, lock herself in her compartment and shed tears all over the place? The nurses up front are all talking about it.”

“Say to her? Tears? Me? Why, I didn’t say anything to her. Is she weeping?”

“I said so, didn’t I? What the devil’s happened, anyhow? Have you ever known her before?”

“From the beginning of the world, old man!”

“You’re bughouse!” snapped the doctor. “You haven’t come out of the ether. The beginning of the world! Night before last you were seeing stars. You’re a nut! Jack, where’s that morphine? Give this coot another shot!”