“When you knew him your hills had done something for him.  They had humanized him.  He went as one goes to exile, full of bitterness.  Your hills were a miracle of wholesomeness.  They cleansed and restored him with the song of their high-riding winds and the whispers of their pines.  They confided to him those things that God only says to man in His own out-of-doors.  Your mountains were good to me.  I became something of a dreamer there, and in those dreams you have always stood as the personal incarnation of those hills.  That is why I have thought of you unendingly ever since.”

Mary Burton’s answer was to shake her head and declare wistfully: 

“I almost wish you hadn’t seen me again.  It would have been better if the illusion could have lasted.”

“Since then,” he went on, “the little girl has grown up and been crowned, but I shall prefer to think of her as she was before she knew she was to wear Cinderella’s slipper.”

“I wonder,” she murmured, “if you can.”

For a time they were silent while the dance music reached them softened by the distance, and then he inquired in a low voice: 

“Do you by any miracle of chance remember an injunction I laid upon you one afternoon by the roadside?”

Mary Burton looked up and answered with a nod of her head.  “Does any woman ever forget her first compliment?”

“What was it?”

“‘Wield leniently the dangerous gift of your witchcraft—­the—­’” She abruptly broke off in the quotation and found herself coloring like a schoolgirl, so Jefferson Edwardes took up the injunction where she had left it incomplete.  “The freakish beauty of your perfect, unmatched eyes,” he prompted.

The girl felt a strange flutter in her breast.  Just now she had blushed.  What had happened to the poise of her usual self-command?  Some influence was abroad tonight or some hypnotism in those steady eyes that gave her a sense of vague apprehension.  It was an apprehension though that thrilled her strangely with a welcome fear—­and a promise.  Tides were stirring that were all new tides.  It was as though marvels were possible.  She heard him saying again as he had said once before, “You are as beautiful as starlight on water.”

“So was Cleopatra, my friend.  So was Helen of Troy.  So were ...  Circe and Faustina.”

“But they,” he laughed, “did not wield kindly the power of their eyes.”

Mary Burton winced, then she turned and faced him.  Her voice trembled.

“Why did I have to meet you tonight?  It isn’t fair!  They have schooled my brain into every useless vanity.  They have fed my selfishness until it has strangled my heart.  Never until today did I face the truth.  All afternoon I’ve been sitting alone—­hating myself.  I am nothing but an artificial little flirt, and I have not obeyed your injunction.”  She paused, then hurried on with the forced manner of one resolved upon full confession!  “Perhaps so far I’ve hurt only myself—­but I’ve done that—­mortally.  Then you come and I learn that you’ve woven an illusion about me—­and I destroy it.”