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 then, evidently satisfied, he nodded to Lachlan and immediately dropped out of sight within the garden.

Lachlan waited, listening intently. There flickered in his mind for an instant a doubt as to where this adventure would lead. Who had sent the black boy, and why? Who was waiting there in the shrubbery of the walled garden? It was perhaps a subtle forewarning of peril. Yet he crouched, sprang upward with outstretched hands, and in a moment was perched on the wall's summit.

He saw her instantly. She was seated en a cane bench in a little recess in the shrubbery, a book in her lap. She wore white with a green shawl about her shoulders. Lachlan knew now what he had only vaguely guessed at their first meeting in the dusk of evening—that her hair was of a most wonderful red gold in which the entangled sunlight worked miracles. He knew now also that her eyes were not gray but gray-green with yellow-tawny lights and very large, and that, in spite of those eyes and that hair, she was not fair-skinned but richly dark.

At that first meeting in the dusk he had been thrilled by her voice, by the grace of her slender form, by the poise of her head. But he had not really seen the brilliant beauty of her, beauty that could shine with its full radiance only when there was light to glorify her hair and reveal the sparkling depths of her eyes. Now, for the first time, he saw her.

It was not strange, perhaps, that he was unaware of the signal that her eyes flashed to him—that he sat