He looked at her shyly.  He was not a man to do homage to material gods, but the pomp and circumstance with which she was surrounded had had a sobering effect upon him, and added to his sense of the instability and unreality of the present moment.  He had an almost guilty feeling of having broken an unwritten law, of abducting a princess, and the old Duncan house had seemed to frown protestingly that such an act should have taken place under its windows.  If Victoria had been—­to him—­an ordinary mortal in expensive furs instead of a princess, he would have snapped his fingers at the pomp and circumstance.  These typified the comforts which, in a wild and forgetful moment, he might ask her to leave.  Not that he believed she would leave them.  He had lived long enough to know that an interest by a woman in a man—­especially a man beyond the beaten track of her observation—­did not necessarily mean that she might marry him if he asked her.  And yet—­oh, Tantalus! here she was beside him, for one afternoon again his very own, their two souls ringing with the harmony of whirling worlds in sunlit space.  He sought refuge in thin thought; he strove, in oblivion, to drain the cup of the hour of its nectar, even as he had done before.  Generations of Puritan Vanes (whose descendant alone had harassed poor Sarah Austere) were in his blood; and there they hung in the long gallery of Time, mutely but sternly forbidding when he raised his hand to the stem.

In silence they reached the crest where the little city ended abruptly in view of the paradise of the silent hills,—­his paradise, where there were no palaces or thought of palaces.  The wild wind of the morning was still.  In this realm at least, a heritage from his mother, seemingly untrodden by the foot of man, the woman at his side was his.  From Holdfast over the spruces to Sawanec in the blue distance he was lord, a domain the wealth of which could not be reckoned in the coin of Midas.  He turned to her as they flew down the slope, and she averted her face, perchance perceiving in that look a possession from which a woman shrinks; and her remark, startlingly indicative of the accord between them, lent a no less startling reality to the enchantment.

“This is your land, isn’t it?” she said.

“I sometimes feel as though it were,” he answered.  “I was out here this morning, when the wind was at play,” and he pointed with his whip at a fantastic snowdrift, before I saw you.”

“You looked as though you had come from it,” she answered.  You seemed —­I suppose you will think me silly—­but you seemed to bring something of this with you into that hail.  I always think of you as out on the hills and mountains.”

“And you,” he said, “belong here, too.”

She drew a deep breath.

“I wish I did.  But you—­you really do belong here.  You seem to have absorbed all the clearness of it, and the strength and vigour.  I was watching you this morning, and you were so utterly out of place in those surroundings.”  Victoria paused, her colour deepening.