“Would you mind—­if I asked you first—­to tell me your story of John Graham?” she spoke softly.  “I know it, a little, but I think it would make everything easier if I could hear it from you—­now.”

He stood up and looked down upon her where she sat, with the light playing in her hair; and then he moved to the window, and back, and she had not changed her position, but was waiting for him to speak.  She raised her eyes, and the question her lips had formed was glowing in them as clearly as if she had voiced it again in words.  A desire rose in him to speak to her as he had never spoken to another human being, and to reveal for her—­and for her alone—­the thing that had harbored itself in his soul for many years.  Looking up at him, waiting, partial understanding softening her sweet face, a dusky glow in her eyes, she was so beautiful that he cried out softly and then laughed in a strange repressed sort of way as he half held out his arms toward her.

“I think I know how my father must have loved my mother,” he said.  “But I can’t make you feel it.  I can’t hope for that.  She died when I was so young that she remained only as a beautiful dream for me.  But for my father she never died, and as I grew older she became more and more alive for me, so that in our journeys we would talk about her as if she were waiting for us back home and would welcome us when we returned.  And never could my father remain away from the place where she was buried very long at a time.  He called it home, that little cup at the foot of the mountain, with the waterfall singing in summer, and a paradise of birds and flowers keeping her company, and all the great, wild world she loved about her.  There was the cabin, too; the little cabin where I was born, with its back to the big mountain, and filled with the handiwork of my mother as she had left it when she died.  And my father too used to laugh and sing there—­he had a clear voice that would roll half-way up the mountain; and as I grew older the miracle at times stirred me with a strange fear, so real to my father did my dead mother seem when he was home.  But you look frightened, Miss Standish!  Oh, it may seem weird and ghostly now, but it was true—­so true that I have lain awake nights thinking of it and wishing that it had never been so!”

“Then you have wished a great sin,” said the girl in a voice that seemed scarcely to whisper between her parted lips.  “I hope someone will feel toward me—­some day—­like that.”

“But it was this which brought the tragedy, the thing you have asked me to tell you about,” he said, unclenching his hands slowly, and then tightening them again until the blood ebbed from their veins.  “Interests were coming in; the tentacles of power and greed were reaching out, encroaching steadily a little nearer to our cup at the foot of the mountain.  But my father did not dream of what might happen.  It came in the spring of the year he took me on my first trip to the States, when I was eighteen.  We were gone five months, and they were five months of hell for him.  Day and night he grieved for my mother and the little home under the mountain.  And when at last we came back—­”