The eternal, ever-recurring miracle has happened.  He sees Woman for the first time, though he had thought himself in love before and had wandered thus far in an effort to forget.  So, likewise, with her.  She had had her fancies, or rather her one fancy; but when in strolling along this road ahead of her party she saw rising between her and the glorious landscape which had hitherto filled her eye the fine masculine head and perfect figure of Carleton Roberts, this fancy floated from her mind like the veriest thistledown, leaving it free to expand in fuller hopes and deeper joys than visit many women even when they think they love.

Alas! why in that instant of mutual revelation had not the further grace been given them of quick catastrophe shutting the door upon a future of which neither could then dream or sense the coming doom.

It was not to be.

He passed, she passed, and for the time the look they gave each other was all; but the world had been glorified for them both—­and Destiny waited.

* * * * *

“Good looks?  Yes; but nothing else; very ordinary connections, very.  A little money, true.  Her uncle, whom by the way I judge you have not seen, will leave her a few thousands; but meanwhile he is a fixture—­will not leave her or let her leave him, which is a misfortune since in a social way he is simply impossible.  No sort of match for you, Roberts.  Cut and run while there is time; that’s my advice to you, given in the most friendly spirit.”

“Thank you.  As I have but just met Miss Taylor, don’t you think such advice is a little premature?”

“No, I don’t.  She is a woman who must be loved or left; that’s all.  You’ve heard me.”

Did Carleton Roberts heed these words?  No.  What man in the thrall of his first romance ever did.

“You love me, Ermentrude?”

“I love you, Carleton.”

“For a day, for a month or for a year?” he smiled.

“Forever,” she answered.

“That’s a long time,” he murmured, with his eyes on a little clock hanging in the shop window before which they had stopped in one of their infrequent walks together.  “A long time!  That foolish little clock will beat out the hours of its short life and go the way of all things, before we shall hardly have entered upon the soul’s ‘forever.’”

“That clock will last our lifetime, Carleton.  Afterward, love will not be counted by hours.”

As she said this she turned her face his way and he saw it in its full flower with the light of heaven upon it.  In later years he may have forgotten the emotions of that moment, but they were the purest, the freest from earthly stain that he was ever destined to know.

“I will love you forever,” he whispered.  “That little clock shall be my witness.”  And he drew her into the shop.

* * * * *

“Cuckoo!”