Although the occurrences of the evening had possessed an Arabian Night’s quality of unreality, he felt no misgivings for the love he had announced and pledged.  It was not as though he looked back on a record of broken promises.  He had no troubling memories to sweep from his conscience before his heart should be clear for a new entry.  He had come away from the mountains with something hermit-like in his nature and much of the idealistic.  It had been a pleasanter thing to him to keep unsullied the more important dreams of life than to endanger them with the transitory pleasures of the philanderer.  The Mary Burton he had known in the dilapidated farm-house had of course been nothing more than a picturesque little waif of the country-side.  Yet she had been a memory that remained distinct through years in New York and Russia; a memory which his imagination had quickened into life.  Of Hamilton’s spectacular successes his world of banking and finance had given him cognizance, but only such interest as one accedes to matters of impersonal news.

So a curiosity had arisen in his mind to see this young woman to whom he had once played the fairy prince, and since he was a whimsical man, that curiosity had woven and twisted itself into a dream.  A dream long entertained may become something more than a dream.  Perhaps it may be a menace.  About their meeting tonight had been so much of the fortuitous that he might regard the whole affair as one operated from the knees of the gods—­and disclaim responsibility.

The house windows had darkened one by one by the time his tramp ended again at Haverly Lodge.  The moon was near the western timber fringe of the mountains, but Mary Burton, still wide-eyed and wakeful, had slipped out of her room to the balcony by her window.

The stone coping where she sat was partly black with shadow and partly platinum gray with the last of the moonlight.  Her hair, falling in two heavy braids, caught the glistening light and her lips were parted in a smile.  “It is strange,” she told herself, “that once before he came along—­and waked me into a new self.  His second coming is stranger still.  It would almost seem that there is no chance about it.  It would almost seem that it has been definitely planned.”  Then she laughed low to herself.  “And if that’s true I have no responsibility in the matter at all.  Nothing I do about it is my fault—­and I needn’t be very angry about his kissing me before he was introduced to me.”

Then she saw a figure leave the shadow of the hedges and cross the moonlit lawn with a confident stride.  Mary Burton leaned a little forward, resting on her hands, and her lips remained parted.

“He seems just about as shameless about the whole affair as I am,” she reflected, and when he was directly below she accosted him in a careful voice:  “Halt, Restless Stranger.  Does a disturbed conscience send you out to wander in the night mists?”