Once when he was a boy, rambling on a summer day in the woods, he had come, rather torn and breathless, through a thicket, upon the sweetest, sunny space, set round with tall, still trees, thick with deep grass and open to the sky. He had flung himself down in the warm grass and lain for long looking up at the far, blue sky with its calm, sailing squadrons of clouds. Something in himself, some quality deep and unrecognized, the quality that made him nearer to his saintly father than to his mother with her worldly energy, had quietly arisen, had seemed to mingle with all the peace and beauty, to draw him to the sky, or to draw all the sky down into his own irradiated and happy heart. He had never forgotten the sunny loneliness; and he had never found the spot again. Felicia made him think of it, of the sweet grass and the still trees and the sky. And when he looked at her he seemed to have struggled through thickets to a sudden, an almost startling peace. But the poem was finished, and she was still looking at Maurice.
“Isn’t that the very heart of love?” Maurice asked.
She paused; she was touched; she did not wish to show how much.
“I should have wanted him to cry,” she said.
“No; I think that if I loved a woman,” Maurice turned the leaves of his book, “I should want her to smile.”
“I don’t believe it. I believe that you would rather she cried dreadfully.”
“You don’t think me capable of these heights of self-abnegation?”
“I was thinking of the heart—as it is. Now, I might have said it all—only, oh! how I should hope that he might be listening at the door!”
The slight tension in Maurice’s voice and look yielded to her swallow-like darts and skimmings; over deep waters perhaps.
“Base girl!” he cried, laughing.