It was almost midnight when they all marched away to Dixie played to rag-time measure and sung by five hundred strong.  With a sigh of relief David held out his arms to Phoebe and started to swing her into the whirl of the dancers.  As his arms fell about her Phoebe pressed close to him with a quick breath and his eyes followed hers across the room.

Under the lights that hung above the entrance to the fern room stood Caroline Darrah like a flower blown against the deep green of the tall palms behind her, and her eyes were lifted to Andrew’s face which smiled down at her with suppressed tragedy.  For an instant she laid her hand on his arm and they were about to catch step with the music when suddenly she swung around into the green tangle beyond her and reached out her hand to draw him after her.

“Pray, David, pray,” said Phoebe as they glided over the polished floor.

“I am,” David whispered back as his arms tightened.  “I can’t think of anything but ’Now I lay me’—­but won’t it help?”

In the wide window at the end of the long room Caroline turned and waited for Andrew.  The lights from the city beat up into her face and she was pale, while her jewel eyes shone black under their long lashes.  Her white gloved hands wrung themselves against his breast as she held him from her.

“Out there while we danced,” she whispered, “I don’t know what, but something told me that you are going to leave me and not tell me why.  You were saying good-by to my heart—­with yours.  Tell me, what is it?”

And with full knowledge of the strange, subtle, superconscious thing that had been between them from the first and which had manifested itself in devious mystic ways, Andrew Sevier had dared to think he could hold her in his arms in an atmosphere charged with the call of a half-barbarous music and take farewell of her—­she all unknowing of what threatened!

“What is it?” she demanded again and her hands separated to clasp his shoulder convulsively.  Her words were a flutter between her teeth.

Then the God of Women struck light across his blindness, and taking her in his arms, he looked her straight in the eyes and told her the whole gruesome bitter tale.  Before he had finished she closed her eyes against his and swayed away from him to the cold window-pane.

“I see,” she whispered, “you don’t want me—­you couldn’t—­you—­never—­did!”

And at that instant the blood bond in Andrew Sevier’s breast snapped and with an awed comprehension of the vast and everlasting Source from which flows the love that constrains and the love that heals, the love that only comes to bind in honor, he reached out and took his own.  In the seventh heaven which is the soul haunt of all in like case, there was no need of word mating.