She was standing close to him, and as she talked it seemed to him that the combined fragrances of the freshly washed night all came from her. He was conscious of the whippoorwill calls and the soft crooning of the river, but only as far-away voices of accompaniment, and she, answering to dreamy influences, too, went on with her recitals from the journal of the woman who had been a lady in Virginia and who probably lay buried under the spot on which they stood.
"Hit's right amazin' ter listen at ye," he said at length. "But plentiful amazin' things comes ter pass."
An amazing thing was coming to pass with him at that moment, for his arms were twitching with an eagerness to close about her, and he seemed struggling against forces of impulse stronger than himself.
It was amazing because he had sworn to avoid the folly of chancing everything on too hasty a love declaration, and because the discipline of patient self-control was strong in him. It was amazing, too, because, with a warning recently received and appreciated, his ears had become deaf to all sounds save her voice, and when the thicket stirred some fifty yards away he heard nothing.
Even the girl herself would ordinarily have paused to bend her head and listen to an unaccustomed sound, but in her as well as in him the close-centred magic was working absorption.
Each of them felt the tense, new something that neither fully understood, but which set them vibrating to a single impulse as the two prongs of a tuning fork answer to one note. Neither of them thought of the figure that hitched its way toward them—more cautious after that first warning rustle—to watch and listen—the figure of an armed man.
For the girl reality seemed to recede into the gossamer of dreams. She could fancy herself the other woman who had lived and died before her—and the face of the man in the moonlight might have been that of the pioneer Thornton. Fancy was stronger than actuality.
"Hit almost seems like," she whispered, "that ther old tree's got a spell in hit—ter bewitch folks with."
"Ef hit has ... hit's a spell I loves right good," he fervently protested.
He heard her breath come quick and sudden, as if under a hypnotic force, and following the prompting of some instinctive mentor, he held out his arms toward her.