“O listen, David,” he said. “Drink it in!”
“ ‘For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins,
The day dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins:
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.’ ”
David would have appreciated this in any case, but never had any poem so romantic a setting as when Frank repeated it to him here, as they lay side by side right out away from land, away from anything but each other and this liquid Paradise of living water.