He looked at her face instead.  “I’ve seen you right here,” he said, “right at this very place, a thousand times.  It’s Eden.  It’s the Garden.  It’s the Beginning.”

“It is the world,” she whispered vaguely.

“Yes, yes—­” Words burst from his lips beyond his power to control.  “It is Eden, it is Paradise, but a vacant Eden, a Paradise incomplete.  Constance—­”

The girl felt herself shiver at this sound of a voice which all too often these past five years had come to her unbidden when she found moments of self-communion in her own restless and dissatisfied life.  Walls had not shut it out, music had not drowned it, gayety had not served to banish it.  She had heard it in her subjective soul ofttimes when the shadows fell and the firelight flickered.  Now, beneath a limitless sky, under a strange radiance, in a wild primeval world—­in this Eden which they two alone occupied—­she heard him, the man whom in her heart she loved, speaking to her once more in very person, and speaking that very thought which was in her own heart that hour.  Her bosom rose tumultuously, her throat fluttered.  Instinctively she would have fled, but a hand on her shoulder pressed her back as she would have arisen, and she obeyed—­as she had always obeyed him—­as she always would.

“Paradise unfinished—­” he whispered, his face close to hers.  “You know what it is that’s missing.”

Ah! could not a woman also know the longing, the vacancy, the solitude of an Eden incomplete!  She turned to him trembling, her lips half open, as though to welcome a long-hoped-for draught of happiness.

Alas! it was not happiness, but misery that came; for Constance Ellsworth now got taste of those bitter waters of life which are withheld from none.  There was a sound of a distant shout—­the chance call of some drunken reveller—­far down the street, a tawdry, unimportant incident, but enough to break a spell, to destroy an illusion, to awaken a conscience for a man, if that phrase be just.  Dan Anderson turned to look down the long street of Heart’s Desire.  It was as though the physical act restored him to another realm, another mental world.  He started, and half shivered as his hand dropped to his side.  His face showed haggard even in the moonlight.

“My God! what am I saying?” he murmured to himself.

Then presently he drew himself up, smiling bitterly.  “Some prominent citizens of the place enjoying themselves,” he said and nodded toward the street.  “Don’t you think you’d like Heart’s Desire?”

The moment of Eve—­the woman’s moment—­the instant for her happiness was past and gone!  The light of the moon lay ghostly over all the world, but there was no radiance, no joy nor comfort in it now.