plar branches and were exalted by
that inexplicable sense of the certainty that things come true.
Dreams--that was what their minds were seeking passionately--and dreams
come true.

"Ain't it wonderful?" Isabel asked softly.

"Yes," said Ellen, in the same hushed tone, "it's wonderful."

"I'll leave you here by yourself an' run acrost the orchard," said
Isabel, in her other careless voice. "When I come back, I'll stop here
an' we'll go in together. Why, Andrew, you here?"

"You said you was afraid," he answered. "I'll go acrost with you."

"All right," said Isabel, with her kindest laugh, not the teasing one
that made him hate her while he thought how bright and dear she was.
"Come take gran'ma acrost the orchard. Don't let anything happen to
her."

They stepped over the wall and made their way along the little path by
the grape arbor. The fragrance of fruit was sweet, and the world seemed
filled with it.

"It's a pretty time o' year," said Andrew tremblingly.

"Yes."

"A kind of a time same 's this is to-night makes it seem as if life was
pretty short. Be past before you know it."

"Yes."

She, too, spoke tremulously, and his heart went out to her.

"O Isabel," he said, "when you're like this, same as you are to-night,
there ain't a livin' creatur' that's as nice as you be."

Isabel laughed. It was an echo of her flouting laugh, yet there was a
little catch in the middle of it.

"There!" he said, with discontentment. "Now you're just as you be half
the time, an' I could shake you for it. Sometimes seems to me I could
kill you."

"Why don't you?" Isabel asked him, softly yet teasingly too, in a way
that suddenly made her dearer. "If you don't see no use o' my livin',
why don't you kill me?"

"What you cryin' for?" Andrew besought her, in an agony of trouble. "O
Isabel, what you cryin' for?"

"I ain't cryin'," she said, "but if I am I guess it's for Ellen Bayliss,
an' things--" She had never heard of "the tears of mortal things," and
so she could not tell him.

"Ellen Bayliss? What's the matter of Ellen Bayliss?"

"Oh, she gets tired so quick, that's all."

"Don't you get tired," said Andrew. "Don't you let anything happen to
you. O Isabel!"

The moonlight and the fragrance and old love constrained them, and they
had kissed each other, and each knew they were to live together now, and
sharpness would be put away perhaps; or, if it were not quite, Andrew
would understand, knowing other things,