“The world lies beneath the waters now—­may I go?”

She looked into his stricken, tired face, and a great pity surged within her heart.  She answered in a voice clear and calm, “No.”

Upward they turned toward life again, and he seized the wheel.  The world was darkening to twilight, and a great, gray pall was falling mercifully and gently on the sleeping dead.  The ghastly glare of reality seemed replaced with the dream of some vast romance.  The girl lay silently back, as the motor whizzed along, and looked half-consciously for the elf-queen to wave life into this dead world again.  She forgot to wonder at the quickness with which he had learned to drive her car.  It seemed natural.  And then as they whirled and swung into Madison Square and at the door of the Metropolitan Tower she gave a low cry, and her eyes were great!  Perhaps she had seen the elf-queen?

The man led her to the elevator of the tower and deftly they ascended.  In her father’s office they gathered rugs and chairs, and he wrote a note and laid it on the desk; then they ascended to the roof and he made her comfortable.  For a while she rested and sank to dreamy somnolence, watching the worlds above and wondering.  Below lay the dark shadows of the city and afar was the shining of the sea.  She glanced at him timidly as he set food before her and took a shawl and wound her in it, touching her reverently, yet tenderly.  She looked up at him with thankfulness in her eyes, eating what he served.  He watched the city.  She watched him.  He seemed very human,—­very near now.

“Have you had to work hard?” she asked softly.

“Always,” he said.

“I have always been idle,” she said.  “I was rich.”

“I was poor,” he almost echoed.

“The rich and the poor are met together,” she began, and he finished: 

“The Lord is the Maker of them all.”

“Yes,” she said slowly; “and how foolish our human distinctions seem—­now,” looking down to the great dead city stretched below, swimming in unlightened shadows.

“Yes—­I was not—­human, yesterday,” he said.

She looked at him.  “And your people were not my people,” she said; “but today——­” She paused.  He was a man,—­no more; but he was in some larger sense a gentleman,—­sensitive, kindly, chivalrous, everything save his hands and—­his face.  Yet yesterday——­

“Death, the leveler!” he muttered.

“And the revealer,” she whispered gently, rising to her feet with great eyes.  He turned away, and after fumbling a moment sent a rocket into the darkening air.  It arose, shrieked, and flew up, a slim path of light, and scattering its stars abroad, dropped on the city below.  She scarcely noticed it.  A vision of the world had risen before her.  Slowly the mighty prophecy of her destiny overwhelmed her.  Above the dead past hovered the Angel of Annunciation.  She was no mere woman.  She was neither high nor low, white nor black, rich