They walked some distance, as far as she dared, when she clutched her hands together and cried 'Oh!' in tragic tones.

'What is it, Theo?' said Joseph anxiously.

'My seed-pearl ring. I've lost it! It's gone from my finger.

Oh, Joseph, go quickly and see if it is in the chaise. Please—— Yes, I'll be all right here. I'll go back to the others. Hurry, do.'

Joseph lumbered away.

She stood alone on the path, around a bend which hid her from the main part of the gardens. Music drifted through the windless air and mingled with the call of a whippoorwill from the meadows outside. Above her head from its iron bracket, a torch guttered, shedding orange light on marble urns filled with geraniums and the fragrant white spikes of flowering privet. And these seemed to her like fairy flowers, indescribably lovely.

She waited quietly, without embarrassment, knowing that he would come to her. But when he stood before her, so tall, his black cocked hat in his hand, his powdered hair shining in the torchlight, she could not speak.

'I didn't think I'd ever find you,' he said, and his voice was the one she had expected, grave, a little harsh, yet softened now by wonder. She knew what he meant, and that he did not refer to this moment.

'What happened to us?' she said simply. 'I don't understand. When I saw you back there in the theater, I felt that I had always known you, that I knew what you were thinking. I had to talk to you. You do not think me common or vulgar that I meet you this way?'

'You know that I don't.'

She looked up at him and smiled. 'This is passing strange,' she said softly.

He nodded. The grim lines about his mouth had vanished so that he seemed young, almost as young as she.

'I've seen you many times before tonight: in the embers of campfires, on the snow-tops of the Alleghenies, reflected in the waters of unnamed rivers. Not your face, perhaps, but you'. His words seemed to her exquisitely fantastic, part of the enchanted borderland in which they wandered together. Louder and more insistent came the wailing of the violins through the trees. A pair of lovers pushed past them and disappeared down the path.

'There is time aplenty to dream in the wilderness,' he added, as though she had questioned.

Wilderness. The thought was alien to her and yet beautiful. She repeated it slowly. 'Wilderness. And what have you to do with the wilderness?'

He raised his head. She saw his eyes darken. 'It has been my mistress, my life. It is where I belong.'

He stepped nearer, but he did not touch her.

'I know nothing of women,' he said, with roughness. 'I do not even think of you as a woman—yet.'

'As what, then?' she whispered.