l."

"I told you it was serious, Nance. I see but one law clearly--I am bound
to want happiness. Every man is bound always to want happiness, Nance. No
man can possibly want anything else. That's the only thing under heaven
I'm sure of at this moment--the one universal law under which we all make
our mistakes--good people and bad alike?"

"But, Bernal, you wouldn't be bad--not really bad?"

"Well, Nance, I've a vague, loose sort of notion that one isn't really
compelled to be bad in order to be happy right here on earth. I know the
Church rather intimates this, but I suspect that vice is not the delicious
thing the Church implies it to be."

"You make me afraid, Bernal--"

"But if I do come back, Nance, having toiled?"

"--and you make me wonder."

"I think that's all either of us can do, Nance, and I must go. I have to
say good-bye to Clytie yet. The poor soul is convinced that I have become
a Unitarian and that there's a conspiracy to keep the horrible truth from
her. She says grandad evaded her questions about it. She doesn't dream
there are depths below Unitarianism. I must try to convince her that I'm
not _that_ bad--that I may have a weak head and a defective heart, but not
that. Nance--girl!"

He sat forward in the chair, reaching toward her. She turned her face
away, but their hands trembled toward each other, faltering fearfully,
tremulously, into a clasp that became at once firm and knowing when it
felt itself--as if it opened their blind eyes to a world of life and light
without end, a world in which they two were the first to live.

Lingeringly, with slow, regretting fingers, the hands fell apart, to
tighten eagerly again into the clasp that made them one flesh.

When at last they were put asunder both arose. The girl patted from her
skirts the hammock's little disarranging touches, while the youth again
made the careful folds in his hat. Then they shook hands very stiffly, and
went opposite ways out of a formal garden of farewell; the youth to sate
that beautiful, crude young lust for living--too fierce to be tamed save
by its own failures, hearing only the sagas of action, of form and colour
and sound made one by heat--the song Nature sings unendingly--but heard
only by young ears.

The girl went back to the Crealock piazza to hear of one better set in the
grace of faith.

"That elder young Linford," began Aunt Bell, ceasing to rock, "has a
future. You know I talked to him about the Episcopal