“Perhaps it was not that way alone. You won't despise me for being mawkish to-night?” he asked. “I haven't had the chance for so long.”
The night air wrapped them warmly, and the balm of the little breezes that stirred the foliage around them was the smell of damask roses from the garden. The creek tinkled over the pebbles at their feet, and a drowsy bird, half-wakened by the moon, crooned languorously in the sycamores. The girl looked out at the flashing water through downcast lashes. “Is it because it is so transient that beauty is pathetic?” she said; “because we can never come back to it in quite the same way? I am a sentimental girl. If you are born so, it is never entirely teased out of you, is it? Besides, to-night is all a dream. It isn't real, you know. You couldn't be mawkish.”
Her tone was gentle as a caress, and it made him tingle to his finger-tips. “How do you know?” he asked in a low voice.
“I just know. Do you think I'm very 'bold and forward'?” she said, dreamily.
“It was your song I wanted to be sentimental about. I am like one 'who through long days of toil'—only that doesn't quite apply—'and nights devoid of ease'—but I can't claim that one doesn't sleep well here; it is Plattville's specialty—like one who
“'Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.'”
“Those blessed old lines!” she said. “Once a thing is music or poetry, all the hand-organs and elocutionists in the world cannot ruin it, can they? Yes; to live here, out of the world, giving up the world, doing good and working for others, working for a community as you do——”
“I am not quite shameless,” he interrupted, smilingly. “I was given a life sentence for incompetency, and I've served five years of it, which have been made much happier than my deserts.”
“No,” she persisted, “that is your way of talking of yourself; I know you would always 'run yourself down,' if one paid any attention to it. But to give up the world, to drop out of it without regret, to come here and do what you have done, and to live the life that must be so desperately dry and dull for a man of your sort, and yet to have the kind of heart that makes wonderful melodies sing in itself—oh!” she cried, “I say that is fine!”
“You do not understand,” he returned, sadly, wishing, before her, to be unmercifully just to himself. “I came here because I couldn't make a living anywhere else. And the 'wonderful melodies'—I have known you only one evening—and the melodies—” He rose to his feet and took a few steps toward the garden. “Come,” he said. “Let me take you back. Let us go before I—” he finished with a helpless laugh.