phics only intelligible to herself, talking
spasmodically to spasmodic boys with budding 'tails,' while Chinese
lanterns let fall their rose and orange light on them and all the other
little couples as exquisitely devoid of ease. Ah! it was worth those
hours of torture to sit there together now, comforting each other with
hands and lips and whisperings. It was more, as much more than that
moment in the orchard, as sun shining after a Spring storm is more than
sun in placid mid-July. To hear him say: "Nedda, I love you!" to feel it
in his hand clasped on her heart was much more, now that she knew how
difficult it was for him to say or show it, except in the dark with her
alone. Many a long day they might have gone through together that would
not have shown her so much of his real heart as that hour of whispering
and kisses.

He had known she was unhappy, and yet he couldn't! It had only made him
more dumb! It was awful to be like that! But now that she knew, she was
glad to think that it was buried so deep in him and kept for her alone.
And if he did it again she would just know that it was only shyness and
pride. And he was not a brute and a beast, as he insisted. But suppose
she had chanced not to come out! Would she ever have lived through the
night? And she shivered.

"Are you cold, darling? Put on my coat."

It was put on her in spite of all effort to prevent him. Never was
anything so warm, so delicious, wrapping her in something more than
Harris tweed. And the hall clock struck--Two!

She could just see his face in the glimmer that filtered from the
skylight at the top. And she felt that he was learning her, learning all
that she had to give him, learning the trust that was shining through her
eyes. There was just enough light for them to realize the old house
watching from below and from above--a glint on the dark floor there, on
the dark wall here; a blackness that seemed to be inhabited by some
spirit, so that their hands clutched and twitched, when the tiny, tiny
noises of Time, playing in wood and stone, clicked out.

That stare of the old house, with all its knowledge of lives past, of
youth and kisses spent and gone, of hopes spun and faiths abashed, the
old house cynical, stirred in them desire to clutch each other close and
feel the thrill of peering out together into mystery that must hold for
them so much of love and joy and trouble! And suddenly she put her
fingers to his face, pa