They were shy at first, as they drifted away from the show train across the vacant lot where the carnival had so recently vended trickery and truth, freaks and fakes, color and light and noise and music. They walked softly, slowly, Sally having the absurd feeling that if the grass stubble were tender, tiny flowers, her joy-light feet would not have crushed them. Her fingers were intertwined with David’s, and the electric thrill of that contact seemed to be the motor force which propelled her body. Without a word as to direction, they drifted, completely in accord, toward a clump of trees which would some day, when Stanton had become beauty-conscious, form the nucleus of a park.
Sally felt that she was in a spell woven of the beauty and breathlessness of the night and of her inarticulate joy as, still without speaking, David took off his coat and spread it upon the ground that sloped gently from the sturdy trunk of an oak tree. As he was stooping to spread the coat her hand hovered over his head, aching to touch the dear, waving crispness of his hair, yet not daring—quite. But when he straightened more suddenly than she had expected, his head fitted into the cup of her hovering hand before she could snatch it away.
He whirled upon her, sweeping her slight body to his breast with such fierceness and suddenness that her head swam.
“Sally! Sally!” Just that hoarse cry, muted, exultant.
Her hands crept slowly up his breast, so loving every inch of the dear body whose warmth came through the cloth of his shirt that they abandoned it reluctantly. When her hands were on his shoulders, clinging there, she threw her head back upon the curve of his right arm, and smiled up into his face. Her lips parting slowly to let out a little gasping sigh of joy.
In the silvery sheen with which the moon joyously and approvingly bathed them their eyes, wide, dark, luminous, clung for an aeon of time, reckoned in the history of love. Then David, knowing that his unasked question had been gloriously answered, bent his head until his lips touched hers.
He must have felt the slight stiffening of her body, the ardor in her small hands as they clung more fiercely to his shoulders. For he flung up his head, then turned it sharply away for a moment, as if ashamed for her to see the passion in his eyes. She took a drunken, uncertain step away from him, and his arms fell laxly from her body.
“What is it, David?” she asked in a small, quavering voice, scarcely more than a whisper.
“I shouldn’t have done that!” David reproached himself with boyish bitterness.
“But David,” Sally pleaded, in that small quaver, “don’t you—don’t you love me—at all? I thought—I—” Her hands fluttered toward him, then dropped hopelessly as he still stood sharply turned away from her.