t world of it. Just as she had made what seemed
like a home out of that old apple house. No one could do that but a
woman, of course ...

She was no longer irritated by this. She barely listened, beyond noting
his circuitous but certain approach to the point of asking her, once
more, to marry him.

Her body seemed drugged with the loveliness of the night, with fatigue,
with him, with the immediacy of him,--but her mind was racing as it does
in dreams.

Nature was not, of course, the gentle sentimentalist Graham was talking
about, but one did get something out of close communion with her. A sense
of fundamentals. She was a--simplifier of ideas. Plain and
straightforward even in her enchantments. That moon they were waiting
for.... Already she was looking down upon a pair of lovers, somewhere,--a
thousand pairs!--with her bland unseeing face. And later to-night, long
after she had risen on them, upon a thousand more.

Of lovers? Well perhaps not. Not if one insisted upon the poets'
descriptions. But good enough for nature's simple purposes. Answering to
a desire, faint or imperious, that would lead them to put on her harness.
Take on her work.

Anthony March had never put on a harness. A rebel. And for the price of
his rebellion never had heard his music, except in his head. Clear
torment they could be, he had told her, those unheard melodies. Somehow
she could understand that. There was an unheard music in her. An
unfulfilled destiny, at all events, which was growing clamorous as the
echo of the boy's passion-if it were but an echo-pulsed in her throat,
drew her body down by insensible relaxations closer upon his.

The moon came up and they watched it, silent. The air grew heavy. The
call of a screech-owl made all the sound there was. She shivered and he
drew her, unresisting, tighter still. Then he bent down and kissed her.

He said, presently, in a strained voice, "You know what I have been
asking. Does that mean yes?"

She did not speak. The moon was up above the trees, yellow now. She
remembered a great broad voice, singing:

"Low hangs the moon. It rose late.
It is lagging-O I think it is heavy with love, with love"

With a passion that had broken away at last, the boy's hands took
possession of her. He kissed her mouth, hotly, and then again; drew back
gasping and stared into her small pale face with burning eyes. Her head
turned a little away from him.

"... Whichever way I turn, O I think you could