She strained his hands to her as though afraid he would slip from her clasp.  “All that is ideal so soon hardens.  I can not bear to think of your changing.”

Bennington leaned forward and their lips met.  “We will forgive him,” he murmured.

And what that remark had to do with it only our gentler readers will be able to say.

Ah, the delicious throbbing silence after the first kiss!

“What was your decision that afternoon on the Rock, Ben?  You never told me.”  She asked presently, in a lighter tone, “Would you have taken me in spite of my family?”

He laughed with faint mischief.

“Before I tell you, I want to ask you something,” he said in his turn.  “Supposing I had decided that, even though I loved you, I must give you up because of my duty to my family—­suppose that, I say—­what would you have done?  Would your love for me have been so strong that you would have finally confessed to me the fact that the Lawtons were not your parents?  Or would you have thrown me over entirely because you thought I did not love you enough to take you for yourself?”

She considered the matter seriously for some little time.

“Ben, I don’t know,” she confessed at last frankly.  “I can’t tell.”

“No more can I, sweetheart.  I hadn’t decided.”

She puckered her brows in the darkness with genuine distress.  Women worry more than men over past intangibilities.  He smiled comfortably to himself, for in his grasp he held, unresisting, the dearest little hand in the world.  Outside, the ever-charming, ever-mysterious night of the Hills was stealing here and there in sighs and silences.  From the darkness came the high sweet tenor of Bert Leslie’s voice in the words of a song: 

    “A Sailor to the Sea, a Hunter to the Pines,
      And Sea and Pines alike to joy the Rover,
    The Wood-smells to the nostrils of the Lover of the Trail,
      And Hearts to Hearts the whole World over!”

Through and through the words of the song, like a fine silver wire through richer cloth of gold, twined the long-drawn, tremulous notes of the white-throated sparrow, the nightingale of the North.

“The dear old Hills,” he murmured tenderly.  “We must come back to them often, sweetheart.”

“I wish, I wish I knew!” she cried, holding his hand tighter.

“Knew what?” he asked, surprised.

“What you’d have done, and what I’d have done!”

“Well,” he replied, with a happy sigh, “I know what I’m going to do, and that’s quite enough for me.”

THE END