"How long?" She laughed low and joyously. "I've enough life to last as long as the sun has heat to warm the world. I shall go on and on and on." She turned to him with a quick, free movement, and stopped at sight of his face, as though she had been smitten into stone. After a moment she bowed her head down on his knees. They sat motionless. When she raised her head, it was to say: "Never mind, we've come safely so far;" but her face was bright with tears.
"O life," she said softly, looking upward to the stars, "don't let me die!"
"Are you so happy?" he said, hungering to hear it was for what he brought her she would stay.
"Yes, yes," she said, grasping his hand; "and I'm so hungry for this being alive."
He drew his hand away.
"A thousand years," he said, with a kind of anger, "wouldn't quench your curiosity, or weary your quest for joy; but a little sorrow may."
She shook her head dreamily.
"I think my soul must have waited long about the gates of life begging to be let in. I'm so content to be here, so willing to take the rough with the smooth, so grateful for the good—"
"So patient with the wrong," he added, with tender self-reproach, and he gathered her up to his breast.
She laughed, a low laugh, with her face pressed close to his, and he felt forgiven, but the girl was only saying to herself, "To think that I've bothered about—why, it would be grotesque for me to die. There'd be no meaning in it—a kind of violence against Nature and probability that reason revolts at. Everything matters so to me. It's for my sake the sun shines, it is for me the moonlight is mysterious, and the ways of life so many, and so thickly set with adventure."