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, too, and smile at it.
When they went back to the bench Ellen was gone, but in the hall they found her dancing with Clyde, and almost, it seemed, clad in the flying mantle of her youth.