She looked back at him and asked faintly, “What was it?”

“That same chemistry of souls,” he declared.  “That same writing of our futures in one horoscope; a voice that decreed:  ’You shall wait for her,’ though I did not understand its message—­until now.  And now that I have seen you, how can I think of pearls?”

To hear words of love spoken in a wild onrush of feeling was no new experience to Mary Burton, yet it was as though she had never heard them before.  In the past her ears had heard, but now her heart was listening, and her heart pounded in her breast as it drank in what the man said.  He talked fast, with his eyes on her eyes, and his hands grasping her white shoulders.  His heart, too, rather than his tongue, was speaking.

“You will read in every book,” he declared, “that such things as this are impossible.  Give our lives the chance to write their own pages and you will know that they are true and inevitable.  To me you have been a dream—­I have told myself over and over again that it was only a dream, the whimsical imagination of a man who has lived too much to himself—­who was abnormal.  Now I have seen you.  Had I seen you every day since that first day it could mean no more to me.  At the first syllable of your voice—­I knew.  I need no further test.”

“But I—?” she faltered.

“You shall take all the time you need.  I told you that you had stood in my mind as the spirit of the hills that gave me back my life.  I told you what I have been telling myself.  Now I know better.  From that first instant my life has been molded—­for this.  Though I did not then know it, I lived because I had to live.  I had to live because it was written that my life should complete itself by loving you.  It was not your hills that gave me health again—­it was yourself.  You do not personify the hills, but the hills personify you.  My dream is no longer a dream, it is a reality.  I love you.”

“But I have told you,” she persisted, “that I am not what you think.”

“You are what I know.  I love you.”

She stood tremblingly before him, and her words came with a whispered wonderment.

“Things like this don’t happen,” she said.  Then she added, “All the things you tell me are such things as life laughs at, and yet there is another side—­my side.  I have yearned to feel something that had the power to lift me out of myself and make me gloriously helpless, something big enough to set my heart beating beyond control—­and I never have felt it—­till now.  I—­I am not the same girl.  I don’t know myself....  You have come and I am suddenly different.”

“Love’s chemistry,” he assured her.  “The Mary Burton of this moment is to be the Mary Burton of always, until she becomes Mary Edwardes.”

“At all events, I must be alone—­to think,” she told him.  “You can go and dance, if you like.  I’ve been here two days and I know all the secret passages.  I’m going to slip into my room by a back stairway and think hard about how angry I am to be with you tomorrow.”