It was of a glorious purple evening late in October that Allan made the great discovery.
He had come in from working with two or three of the hardier Folk on the temporary hangar he was building for the Pauillac on Newport Heights, to which a broad and well-graded roadway now extended through the jungle.
Entering the home-cave suddenly--and it was home now indeed, with its broad stone fireplace, its comfortable furnishings, its furs, its mats of clean, sweet-smelling rushes--he stopped, toil-worn and weary, to view the well-loved place.
"Well, little wife! Busy, as usual? Always busy, sweetheart?"
At his greeting Beatrice looked up as though startled. She was sitting in a low easy-chair he had made for her of split bamboos cleverly lashed and softly cushioned.
At her left hand, on the palm-wood table, stood a heavy bronze lamp from some forgotten millionaire's palace in Atlanta. Its soft radiance illumined her face in profile, making a wondrous aureole of her clustered hair, as in old paintings of the Madonna at the Annunciation.
A presage gripped the man's heart, drawing powerfully at its strings with pain, yet with delicious hope and joy as she turned toward him.
For something in her face, some new, beatified, maternal loveliness, not to be analyzed or understood, betrayed her wondrous secret.
With a little gasp, she dropped into her lap the bit of needlework and sought to hide it with her hands--a gesture wholly girlish yet--to hide and guard it with those hands, so useful and beautiful, so precious and so dearly loved.
But Allan, breathing hard and deep, strode to her, his face aflame with hope and adoration. He caught them up together in the gentle strength of his rough hands and pressed them to his heart.
Beside her he knelt silently; he encircled her with his right arm. Then he took up the tiny garment, smiling.
For a long minute their eyes met.
His brimmed with sudden tears. Hers fell, and her head drooped down upon his breast, and--as once before, at the cathedral--an eloquent tide of crimson mounted from breast to throat, from cheek to tendrilled hair.
About his neck her arms slid, trembled, tightened.
No word was uttered there under the golden lamp-glow; but the strong kiss he pressed, reverently, proudly, upon her brow, renewed with ten-time depth their eternal sacrament of love.