"I wish I were a man." She spoke bitterly. The beauty of the night seemed to break about her, and this castle of whim that had looked, a moment ago, more solid than certainty, was crumbling.
"Now you're doing what I told you not to," he warned her gravely. "You have stopped telling the truth. You don't wish you were a man. Think how happy you were a minute ago, only because you are a beautiful woman and you heard the nightingale."
She was struggling back into the clear medium that had been between them the moment before.
"I only meant"—she spoke painstakingly, hunting for words and pathetically anxious to have them right—"I only meant—I have been unhappy. No man would have been as unhappy as I have been."
Osmond smiled a little to himself, in grave communing. The uphill road of his life presented itself to him as a thorny way so hard that, if he had foreseen it from the beginning, he would have said it was impossible. But at the same instant he remembered where it had led him: he had come out into clear air, he was resting in this garden of delight. And she, too, was resting. He knew that with a perfect certainty.
"We have begun over," he warned her. "We don't have to remember. See the moon driving along the sky. We are going with her, fast. Look at her, playmate."
She looked up into the sky where the moon seemed to be racing past more stable clouds. It was as if their spiritual gaze met there, to be welded into a mutual compact. This was the ecstasy of silence. Presently a sound broke it, a whistle loud and clear from the other field. Osmond was at once upon his feet.
"Come," he said, "we must go. There's Peter."
"But why must we go?" She was struggling out of her trance of quietude, almost offended at his haste.
"Come with me. We will meet him in the field. It is too—too splendid, here. This is our castle under the tree. Don't you know it is? We can't ask anybody in—not even Peter."