'I want to speak to ee.'

Paul stumbled out, blind and stupid. She was standing at the open door
with some gauzy white stuff loosely folded over her hair and drawn over
her bosom. The July moon was at the full, and low in the heavens.

'Look at that,' she said, and Paul looked.

The four poplars clove the intense dark blue, but not so loftily as
in his first remembrance of them. The street was quiet Not a sound
disturbed the humming spicy silence of the summer night Paul turned from
that sweet intoxication to her face. She smiled at him, and his heart
seemed to swoon. He did not know till later, but she suffered from some
very slight tenderness of the eyes which made them shrink from too much
light, and he had never seen her in her full beauty until this moment,
when they seemed so large and deep that he could scarcely bear to look
at them. She had a hat in her hand, and she held it out to him, still
smiling, but so dreamily, so unlike herself, that he could but look and
tremble and wonder. He took the hat mechanically, and saw that it was
his own. He thought himself dismissed, and his heart changed from a soft
ethereal fire to cold lead.

'Auntie!' she called--'Aunt Deb 'Me and Paul's goin' to take a bit of a
walk. I've got to give him a lecture.'

Some affectionate assenting answer came, and May floated into the
moonlight, across the street, and into a shady alley which lay between
two high-hedged gardens; then into moonlight again, across another road,
through a clinking turnstile, and into a broad field, where Paul had
played many a game of cricket before and after working hours. From
here the open country gleamed, mystic and strange; every hill and dale
familiar, and all unlike themselves, as a friend's ghost might be unlike
the living friend.

Her first words jarred his dream to pieces.

'You're a funny boy, Paul. After all that fullishness of yours this
morning I met your brother Dick. He gave me something. I've got it here
this minute. I want to know if it belongs to you--really. Dick says it's
all your very own, but I don't more'n half believe him. I say you must
have copied it out of some book. Now, di'n't ee?'

'I don't know,' said Paul huskily. 'What is it?'

'It's a piece of poetry,' she said. 'Can you make poetry?'

'I try sometimes,' said Paul.

It cost an effort to answer. He wanted her to know, and he shrank from
her knowing.

'Did you make this?'

'What?'

'I'll tell it.'

She spoke