w long could the woman stand it?".... She humoured, smilingly, my
crystal-gazing into our future, as though she had not the heart to
deprive me of the pleasure.

"I simply can't believe in it, Hugh," she said when I pressed her for an
answer.

"Why not?"

"I suppose it's because I believe in continuity, I haven't the romantic
temperament,--I always see the angel with the flaming sword. It isn't
that I want to see him."

"But we shall redeem ourselves," I said. "It won't be curiosity and
idleness. We are not just taking this thing, and expecting to give
nothing for it in return."

"What can we give that is worth it?" she exclaimed, with one of her
revealing flashes.

"We won't take it lightly, but seriously," I told her. "We shall find
something to give, and that something will spring naturally out of our
love. We'll read together, and think and plan together."

"Oh, Hugh, you are incorrigible," was all she said.

The male tendency in me was forever strained to solve her, to deduce from
her conversation and conduct a body of consistent law. The effort was
useless. Here was a realm, that of Nancy's soul, in which there was
apparently no such thing as relevancy. In the twilight, after dinner, we
often walked through the orchard to a grassy bank beside the little
stream, where we would sit and watch the dying glow in the sky. After a
rain its swollen waters were turbid, opaque yellow-red with the clay of
the hills; at other times it ran smoothly, temperately, almost clear
between the pasture grasses and wild flowers. Nancy declared that it
reminded her of me. We sat there, into the lush, warm nights, and the
moon shone down on us, or again through long silences we searched the
bewildering, starry chart of the heavens, with the undertones of the
night-chorus of the fields in our ears. Sometimes she let my head rest
upon her knee; but when, throbbing at her touch, with the life-force
pulsing around us, I tried to take her in my arms, to bring her lips to
mine, she resisted me with an energy of will and body that I could not
overcome, I dared not overcome. She acknowledged her love for me, she
permitted me to come to her, she had the air of yielding but never
yielded. Why, then, did she allow the words of love to pass? and how draw
the line between caresses? I was maddened and disheartened by that
elusive resistance in her--apparently so frail a thing!--that neither
argument nor importunity could break down. Was ther