A Phantom of Delight

latest day Eric Marshall will be able to recall vividly that scene as he saw it then —the velvet darkness of the spruce woods, the overarching sky of soft bril- liance, the swaying lilac blossoms, and amid it all the girl on the old bench with the violin under her chin.

He had, in his twenty-four years of life, met hundreds of pretty women, scores of handsome women, a scant half dozen of really beautiful women. But he knew at once, beyond all possibility of question or doubt, that he had never seen or imagined anything so exquisite as this girl of the orchard. Her loveliness was so perfect that his breath almost went from him in his first delight of it.

Her face was oval, marked in every cameo—like line and feature with that ex- pression of absolute, flawless purity, found in the angels and Madonnas of old paintings, a purity that held in it no faintest stain of earthliness. Her head

was bare, and her thick, jetcblack hair 61