The path was wide enough for two, and side by side they moved slowly forward.
The somber garb in which he was dressed, and the brilliant colors of her apparel, afforded a contrast like that between a pheasant and a scarlet tanager. Color, form, motion—all were perfect. They fitted into the scene without a jar or discord, and enhanced rather than disturbed the harmony of the drowsy landscape.
As they walked onward, they vaguely felt the influence of the repose that was stealing upon the tired world; the intellectual and volitional elements of their natures becoming gradually quiescent, the emotions were given full sway. They felt themselves drawn toward each other by some irresistible power, and, although they had never before been conscious of any incompleteness of their lives, they suddenly discovered affinities of whose existence they had never dreamed. Their two personalities seemed to be absorbed into one new mysterious and indivisible being, and this identity gave them an incomprehensible joy. Over them as they walked, Nature brooded, sphynx-like. Their young and healthy natures were tuned in unison with the harmonies of the world like perfect instruments from which the delicate fingers of the great Musician evoked a melody of which she never tired, reserving her discords for a future day. On this delicious evening she permitted them to be thrilled through and through with joy and hope and she accompanied the song their hearts were singing with her own multitudinous voices. "Be happy," chirped the birds; "be happy," whispered the evening breeze; "be happy," murmured the brook, running along by their side and looking up into their faces with laughter. The whole world seemed to resound with the refrain, "Be happy! Be happy! for you are young, are young, are young!"
Pepeeta first broke the silence.
"I had never heard of the things about which you talked," she said.
"Thee never had? How could that be? I thought that every one knew them!"
"I must have lived in a different world from yours."
"What sort of a world has thee lived in?"
"A world of fairs and circuses, of traveling everywhere and never stopping anywhere."
"Has thee never been in a church?"