"Oh! thank you, thank you a thousand times; that is like yourself!" Pepeeta said, her face aglow with gratitude.
It was a light from the soul itself that shone through the thin transparency of that face, pale with thought and suffering, and gave it its new radiance.
The world around them was steeped in autumn beauty. A gigantic smile was on the face of Nature. Fleecy, fleeting clouds were chasing each other across the blue dome of the heavens. The hazy atmosphere of the Indian summer softened the landscape and lent it a mystical and unearthly charm. The forests were resplendent with those brilliant colors which appear like a last flush of life upon the dying face of summer, as she sinks into her wintry grave. The autumn birds were singing; the autumn flowers were blooming; yellow golden rod and scarlet sumach glowed in the corners of the fences; locusts chirped in treetops; grasshoppers stridulated in the meadows, one or two of them making more noise than a whole drove of cattle lying peacefully chewing their cud beneath an umbrageous elm and lifting up their great, tranquil, blinking eyes to the morning sun. Here and there boys and girls could be seen in the vineyards and orchards gathering grapes and apples. Farmers were cutting their grain and stacking it in great brown shocks, digging potatoes, or plowing the fertile soil. Now and then a traveler met or passed them, clucking to his horses and hurrying to the city with his produce. Amid these gracious influences, life gradually lost its stern reality and took on the characteristics of a pleasant dream. The fever and unrest abated, burdens weighed less heavily, sorrow became less poignant; the finer joys of both the waking and sleeping hours of existence were mysteriously blended.
Sharp and irritating as the encounter had been between the two lovers, the momentary antipathy passed away as they moved along. They drew nearer together; they lifted their eyes furtively; their glances met; they smiled; they spoke; their sympathies flowed back into the old channel; their hopes and affections mingled. They gave themselves up to joy with the abandon of youth, falling into that mood in which everything pleases and delights. Nature did not need to tell them her secrets aloud, for they comprehended her whispers and grasped her meaning from sly hints. They melted into her moods.
What joys were theirs! To be young; to be drawn together by an affinity which produced a mysterious and ineffable happiness; to wander aimlessly over the earth; to yield to every passing fancy; to dream; to hope; to love. It was the culminating hour of their lives.
Passing through the little village since called Avondale, they turned down what is now the Clinton Springs road, climbed a hill, descended its other slope, and came upon an old spring house where, as they paused to drink, David scratched their names with his penknife on one of the stones of the walls, where they may be read to-day.
Leaving the turnpike, they entered a grove through which flowed a noisy stream; cast themselves upon a bank, bathed their faces, ate their lunch and rested. There for a few moments, in the tranquil and uplifting influence of the silence and the solitude, all that was best in their natures came to the surface. Pepeeta nestled down among the roots of a great beech tree, her hat flung upon the ground by her side, her arms folded across her bosom, her face upturned like a flower drinking in the sunshine or the rain. At her feet her lover reclined, his head upon his arms and his gaze fixed upon the canopy of leaves which spread above them and through which as the branches swayed in the breeze he caught glimpses of the sky.
Pepeeta broke the silence. "I could stay here forever," she said. "I nestle here in the roots of this great tree like a little child in the arms of its mother. I feel that everything around me is my friend. I feel, not as if I were different from other things, but as if I were a part of them. Do you comprehend? Do you feel that way?"
"More than at any time since leaving home," he said. "That was the way I always felt in the old days—how far away they seem! I could then sit for hours beside a brook like this, and thoughts of God would flow over my soul like water over the stones; and now I do not think of Him at all! It was by a brook like this that we first met. Do you remember, Pepeeta?"
"I shall never forget."