"Oh, Miss Stewart, you!" she smiled with her usual delight and going toward Agnes caught her arm affectionately, and then, with face still beaming, she turned to where Baptiste stood.

"I want you, Miss Stewart," she said with much ostentation, "to meet one of our neighbors and friends; one of the most enterprising young men of the country, Mr. Jean Baptiste. Mr. Baptiste, Miss Agnes Stewart." She did it gracefully, and for a time was overcome by her own vanity. In the meantime the lips of both those before her parted to say that they had met, and then slowly, understandingly, they saw that this would mean to explain.... Their faces lighted with the logic of meeting formally, and greetings were exchanged to fit the occasion.

For the first time he was permitted to see her, to regard her as the real Agnes. There was no embarrassment in her face but composure as she extended her small ungloved hand this time and permitted it to rest lightly in his palm. She smiled easily as she accepted his ardent gaze and showed a row of even white teeth momentarily before turning coquetishly away.

He regarded her intimately in one sweep of his eyes. She accepted this also with apparent composure. She was now fully normal in her composition. That about her which others had understood, and were inspired to call beautiful now seemed to strangely affect him.

Was it because he was hungry for woman's love; because since he had looked upon this land of promise and out of the visions she had come to him in those long silent days; because of his lonely young life there in the sod house she had communed with him; was it that he had imagined her sweet radiance that now caused him to feel that she was beautiful?

She had looked away only briefly, as if to give him time to think, to consider her, and then she turned her eyes upon him again. She regarded him frankly then, albeit admiringly. She wanted to hear him say something. She was not herself aware of how anxious she was to hear him speak; for him to say anything, would please her. And as she stood before him in her sweet innocence, all the goodness she possessed, the heart and desire always to be kind, to do for others as she had always, was revealed to him. His dream girl she was, and in reality she had not disappointed him.

If visionary he had loved her, he now saw her and what was hers. Her wondrous hair, rolled into a frivolous knot at the back of her head made her face appear the least slender when it was really square; the chestnut glint of it seemed to contrast coquettishly with her white skin; and the life, the healthy, cheerful life that now gave vigor to her blood brought faint red roses to her cheeks; roses that seemed to come and go. Her red lips seemed to tempt him, he was captivated. He forgot in this intimate survey that she was of one race while he, Jean Baptiste, was of another.... And that between their two races, the invisible barrier, the barrier which, while invisible was so absolute, so strong, so impossible of melting that it was best for the moment that he forget it.