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"Life, all life--just dancing sparks--then gone!" said Beatrice slowly "And yet--yet it is good to have lived, Allan Good to have lighted the black mystery of the universe, formless and endless and inscrutable, by even so brief a flicker!"

"Is it ht?" he asked "Too tired, that's all In the s will look different You must smile, then, Beta, and not think of for sad at all For to--day"

He felt her catch her breath and tre-day, Allan Surely the strangest since tiifts, no witnesses, no"How can 's our friend! All nature is our friend--the whole life-process is our friend and ally! Gifts? What need have we of gifts? Aren't you ift that a s? Am I not yours?

"Minister? Priest? We need none! The world-to-be shall have got far away froe, its weaknesses and fears of the Unknohich alone explain their existence Here on Stor, under the arches of the old cathedral our clasped hands, our--mutual words of love and trust and honor--these shall suffice The river and the winds and forest, the sunlight and the sky, the whole infinite expanse of Nature herself shall be our priest and witnesses And never has a wedding been so true, so solemn and so holy as yours and mine shall be For you are mine, my Beatrice, and I am yours--forever!"

A little silence, while the flaher and the shadows deepened in the dim aisles of the fir-forest all about the star-points had begun to shihted ether in the wild For them there was no sense of isolation nor any loneliness She was his world now, and he hers

Up into his eyes she looked fairly and bravely, and her full lips sive me, Allan!" she whispered "It was only a mood, that's all It's passed now--it won't coirl!" hethe thick hair back fro, never afraid!"

Their lips irl's heart throbbed on his

Afar a wolf's weird, tremulous call drifted doind An owl, disturbed in its nocturnal quest, hooted upon the slope above to eastward; and across the darkening sky reeled an unsteady bat, far larger than in the old days when there were cities on the earth and ships upon the sea