“Nor I!  I know, too.”

“I hope Jim will be glad,” she suggested.

“He’ll be delighted, and vastly relieved.  It has puzzled him fearfully of late to see you living away from me.”

We sat down, for there seemed much to say.

“I believed more than you did, with all your game,” she taunted me.

“But you broke the rules.  Anybody can believe anything if he can break all the rules.”

“I’d a dreadful time showing you that I meant to.”

I shall not detail a conversation that could have but little interest to others.  Indeed, I remember it but poorly.  I only know that it seemed magically to feed upon itself, yet waxed to little substance for the memory.

One thing, however, I retain vividly enough.  In a moment when we both were silent, renewing our amazement at the stars, there burst upon the night a volume of song that I instantly identified.

“She sleeps, my lady sleeps!” sang the clear tenor of Arthur Updyke.  “My lady sleeps—­she sleeps!” sang three other voices in well-blended corroboration; after which the four discoursed upon this interesting theme.

We were down from the stars at once, but I saw nothing to laugh at, and said as much.

“We might take them out some sandwiches and things to drink,” persisted my Little Miss.

But the starlight had shown me a gleam in her eyes that was too outrageously Peavey.

“We will not” I chanted firmly to the music’s mellowed accompaniment.  “I am free to say now that the thing must be stopped, but you shall do it less brutally—­to-morrow or next day.”

“Oh, well, if you—­”

She nestled again.  So soon had this habit seemed to fasten upon her adaptable nature.

“It’s wonderful what one arm can do,” she said; and in the darkness she felt for the closing hand of it to draw it yet more firmly about her.

“It has the spirit of all the arms in the world, Little Miss—­oh, my Little Miss—­my dream woman come true!”

She nestled again, with a sigh of old days ended.

“You can’t get any closer,” I admonished.

“Here!” she whispered insistingly, so that I felt the breath of it.

CHAPTER XXX

BY ANOTHER HAND

A wanderer from Little Arcady in early days returned to its placid shades after many years, drawn thither by a little quick-born yearning to walk the old streets again.  But he found such strangeness in these that his memory was put to prodigious feats of reconstruction ere it could make them seemly as of yore.