“This is all so—­so wrong,” she faltered, “that I think it must be right....  Do you truly love me?...  Don’t kiss me if you do....  Now I believe you....  Lift me; I can’t walk in this fish’s tail....  Now set me afloat, please.”

He lifted her, walked to the water’s edge, bent and placed her in the sea.  In an instant she had darted from his arms out into the waves, flashing, turning like a silvery salmon.

“Are you coming?” she called back to him.

He did not stir.  She swam in a circle and came up beside the rock.  After a long, long silence, she lifted up both arms; he bent over.  Then, very slowly, she drew him down into the water.

* * * * *

“I am quite sure,” she said, as they sat together at luncheon on the sandspit which divides Northport Bay from the s.w. of Oyster Bay, “that you and I are destined for much trouble when we marry; but I love you so dearly that I don’t care.”

“Neither do I,” he said; “will you have another sandwich?”

And, being young and healthy, she took it, and biting into it, smiled adorably at her lover.

[Illustration]

OTHER BOOKS BY

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

It was Mr. Chambers himself who wrote of the caprices of the Mystic Three—­Fate, Chance, and Destiny—­and how it frequently happened that a young man “tripped over the maliciously extended foot of Fate and fell plump into the open arms of Destiny.”  Perhaps it was due to one of the pranks of the mystic sisters that Mr. Chambers himself should lay down his brush and palette and take up the pen.  Mr. Chambers studied art in Paris for seven years.  At twenty-four his paintings were accepted at the Salon; at twenty-eight he had returned to New York and was busy as an illustrator for Life, Truth, and other periodicals.  But already the desire to write was coursing through him.  The Latin Quarter of Paris, where he had studied so long, seemed to haunt him; he wanted to tell its story.  So he did write the story and, in 1893, published it under the title of “In the Quarter.”  The same year he published another book, “The King in Yellow,” a grewsome tale, but remarkably successful.  The easel was pushed aside; the painter had become writer.

Writing of Mr. Chambers’s novel of last fall

THE DANGER MARK

in The Bookman, Dr. Frederic Taber Cooper said, “In this last field (the society novel) it would seem as though Mr. Chambers had, at length, found himself; and the fact that the last of the four books is the best and most sustained and most honest piece of work he has yet done affords solid ground for the belief that he has still better and maturer volumes yet to come.  There is no valid reason why Mr. Chambers should not ultimately be remembered as the novelist who left behind him a comprehensive human comedy of New York.”