At the end of his vows and entreaties, she lifted her face radiantly, and bent a smile upon him as sunny as that with which the sky after a summer storm denies that there has ever been rain in the world.

“Ah! you—­” He could say no more.  He could not be more enraptured than he was.  He could only pass from surprise to surprise, from delight to delight.  It was her love of him which wrought these miracles.  It was all a miracle, and no part more wonderful than another.  That she, who had seemed as distant as a star, and divinely sacred from human touch, should be there in his arms, with her head on his shoulder, where his kiss could reach her lips, not only unforbidden, but eagerly welcome, was impossible, and yet it was true..  But it was no more impossible and no truer, than that a being so poised, so perfectly self-centred as she, should already be so helplessly dependent upon him for her happiness.  In the depths of his soul he invoked awful penalties upon himself if ever he should betray her trust, if ever he should grieve that tender heart in the slightest thing, if from that moment he did not make his whole life a sacrifice and an expiation.

He uttered some of these exalted thoughts, and they did not seem to appear crazy to her.  She said yes, they must make their separate lives offerings to each other, and their joint lives an offering to God.  The tears came into his eyes at these words of hers:  they were so beautiful and holy and wise.  He agreed that one ought always to go to church, and that now he should never miss a service.  He owned that he had been culpable in the past.  He drew her closer to him—­if that were possible—­and sealed his words with a kiss.

But he could not realise his happiness then, or afterward, when he walked the streets under the thinly misted moon of that Indian summer night.

He went down to the Events office when he left Alice, and found Boardman, and told him that he was engaged, and tried to work Boardman up to some sense of the greatness of the fact.  Boardman shoved his fine white teeth under his spare moustache, and made acceptable jokes, but he did not ask indiscreet questions, and Dan’s statement of the fact did not seem to give it any more verity than it had before.  He tried to get Boardman to come and walk with him and talk it over; but Boardman said he had just been detailed to go and work up the case of a Chinaman who had suicided a little earlier in the evening.

“Very well, then; I’ll go with you,” said Mavering.  “How can you live in such a den as this?” he asked, looking about the little room before Boardman turned down his incandescent electric.  “There isn’t anything big enough to hold me but all outdoors.”

In the street he linked his arm through his friend’s, and said he felt that he had a right to know all about the happy ending of the affair, since he had been told of that miserable phase of it at Portland.  But when he came to the facts he found himself unable to give them with the fulness he had promised.  He only imparted a succinct statement as to the where and when of the whole matter, leaving the how of it untold.