ee you."

"I thought you would come."

He was sitting there, his back against the wall, and at once she sank
down opposite him on a stone that made her a prim little seat. The
shadow lay upon her in flecks, but the outline of her white dress was
visible to him.

"Did you call me?" she asked. There was no trace of her unrest of the
moments before, either in her manner or in her own happy consciousness.
She felt instead a delicious ease and security that needed no explaining
even to herself.

Osmond answered as if he were deliberating.

"I don't know whether I called you. I hope I didn't. I was thinking
about you, of course."

"Why do you hope you didn't?"

"Because I haven't any right to."

"Doesn't my coming prove you had a right to? You see you did call me,
and I came."

After a moment he answered irrelevantly,--

"I'm a cowardly sort of chap. When I feel like calling you, I choke it
down. I don't want to get the habit of you."

"Why not?"

"One reason--it will be so difficult when you go away."

A sense of freedom and happiness possessed her. Words rose tumultuously
to her lips, to be choked there. She wanted to say unreasonably, "I
shall never go away. How could you think it?" But instead she asked,
with a happy indirection, "Where am I going?"

He, too, answered lightly,--

"How should I know? Back into your cloud, I guess--dear goddess." The
last words were very low, and to himself, but she heard them. Instantly
and against all reason, she, who had never meant to be happy again,
laughed ecstatically.

"Think," she said, "a month ago I didn't know you were in the world."

"Oh, yes, you did. Peter told you he had a kind of a brother, that
worked on the farm. But I didn't know you were in the world."

"Of course," she deliberated softly, "I knew Peter had a brother. But I
didn't know it was you."

The moonlit air was as beguiling to him as it was to her. Everything was
different and everything was possible. He put his hand to his head and
tried to recall old prudences. In vain. The still, bright world told
him, with a voice so quiet that it was like a hand upon his heart, that
it was the only world. The daylight one of doubts and dull expediency
had been arranged by man. This was the home of the spirit. For a moment
he felt himself drowning in that sea of life. Then, perhaps lifted by
his striving will, he seemed to come out again to the free air that had
touched him at her coming. Again he w