“The house was too narrow for me,” said Alaine, when they arose and faced each other. “I was too full of thanksgiving to give it utterance there. My Lendert! my Lendert! Are we dead and is this heaven?” She yielded her sweet body to his embrace. So thrilled with happiness she was that it seemed that the world must fade before her blurred vision.
“My sweet! my sweet!” whispered Lendert, “I am a gift to you.” And there in his arms she listened to the story of his rescue and received her message.
Standing on tiptoe she touched her lips to the red scar upon his cheek. “So I receive him, François,” she said. “Thou poor mistaken, unhappy soul, God give thee peace in thine hour of death. I forgive thee. So I receive this gift dedicated to me by thy great courage and by thy supreme renunciation.”
The tangy, winelike odor of the leaves under their feet filled the air. From the little farmsteads came the cheerful sounds of stirring life. Through the purple mists at the end of the path could be seen glimpses of the blue sound. The hush of Indian summer, not unlike that of an expectant spring, was around and over them.
“Do you remember that last morning when we went out into the woods together?” Alaine asked.
“Can we forget it?”
“Never has broken a morning since that when I have not felt the horror of it. That was why I came out so early, that I might take my happiness with the dawn and remember that day no more. I have been so wretched, so weary.”
“And now?”
She gazed at him with eyes full of love, while into his own came the look which long ago had caught her heart. “Thou lovest me?” he murmured.
“I love thee! I love thee! Ah, how I love thee!”