She crouched beside me; her soft arm stole about my neck. “Dearest, forgive me,” she murmured.
Her eyes were blinded; my lips against her cheek were salt. She clung to me desperately, as though a hand pressed on her shoulder to jerk her from me—Vi’s hand.
Where a rutted lane sloped down to a wooded hollow, the lovers turned. Among pollarded trees we lost them. They would never know that we had watched them. So they vanished out of our lives, walking hand-in-hand toward child-bearing and the inevitable separation of death that lurked for them at some hidden cross-road. We, equally unknowing, to what place of parting were we faring?
I tilted up her face. “I’ve been a selfish fool. I’ll never speak another word about marriage or anything that will pain you. Oh, Fiesole, if you could only love me—love me as I love you—as though there was nothing else left!” She took my hands in her small ones, pressing them to her breast, quoting in a low sing-song, “Laugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span. Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.”
“I like that—‘the old proud pageant of man.’ I wonder where you got it. But is there to be nothing deeper between us than laughter?”
“If we do the laughing,” she said, “life’s ready to do the rest. But you’re a puritan at heart: you suspect that gladness is somehow unholy. Don’t you know, Mr. Bunyan, that laughter is the language they speak in heaven?”
“I don’t; neither do you. But when you say so laughing, I can almost believe it.”
When we had once again started, she became more frank. It was because my hands were occupied, perhaps. Laying her cheek against my shoulder, “Dante, I’m not a flirt,” she said. “I just can’t make up my mind about you.”
“Maybe, I’ll make it up for you.”
“Maybe. But I want you to understand why I did what I did this morning—speeding like that and behaving as though I was cracked. I was afraid you were going to make love to me every moment—and I didn’t want it.”