I think, but something--I know
not what--something inborn that conquered spite of myself, and a guilty
and rebellious heart that, after all, had only asked for love, at any
price--only love, but _all_ of it, its sweetness unbridled, its mystery
unfathomed--lest the body die, and the soul, unsatisfied, wing upward to
eternal ignorance.

As I crouched there beside her, in the darkness below the tall
hall-clock fell a-striking; and she moved, sighed, and sat
up--languid-eyed and pink from slumber.

"Carus," she murmured, "how long have I slept? How long have you been
here, my darling? Heigho! Why did you wake me? I was in paradise with
you but now. Where are you? I am minded to drowse, and go find you in
paradise again."

She pushed her hair aside and turned, resting her chin on one hand,
regarding me with sweet, sleepy, humorous eyes that glimmered like
amethysts in the moonlight.

"Were ever two lovers so happy?" she asked. "Is there anything on earth
that we lack?--possessing each other so completely. Tell me, Carus."

"Nothing," I said.

"Nothing," she echoed, leaning toward me and resting in my arms for a
moment, then laid her hands on my shoulders, and, raising herself to a
sitting posture, fell a-laughing to herself.

"While you were gone this afternoon," she said, "and I was lying here,
eyes wide open, seeming to feel the bed sway like the ship, I fell to
counting the ticking of the stair-clock below, and thinking how each
second was recording the eternity of my love for you. And as I lay
a-listening and thinking, came one by the window singing 'John O'Bail',
and I heard voices in the tap-room and the clatter of pewter flagons.
On a settle outside the tap-room window, full in the sun, sat the
songster and his companions, drinking new ale and singing 'John
O'Bail'--a song I never chanced to hear before, and I shall not soon
forget it for lack of schooling"--and she sang softly, sitting there,
clasping her knees, and swaying with the quaint rhythm:

"'Where do you wend your way, John O'Bail,
Where do you wend your way?'
'I follow the spotted trail
Till a maiden bids me stay,'
'Beware of the trail, John O'Bail,
Beware of the trail, I say!'

"Thus it runs, Carus, the legend of this John O'Bail, how he sought the
wilderness, shunning his kind, and traveled and trapped and slew the
deer, until one day at sunrise a maid of the People of the Morning
hailed him, bidding him stay: