"But, Bernal, you wouldn't be bad—not really bad?"
"Well, Nance, I've a vague, loose sort of notion that one isn't really compelled to be bad in order to be happy right here on earth. I know the Church rather intimates this, but I suspect that vice is not the delicious thing the Church implies it to be."
"You make me afraid, Bernal——"
"But if I do come back, Nance, having toiled?"
"——and you make me wonder."
"I think that's all either of us can do, Nance, and I must go. I have to say good-bye to Clytie yet. The poor soul is convinced that I have become a Unitarian and that there's a conspiracy to keep the horrible truth from her. She says grandad evaded her questions about it. She doesn't dream there are depths below Unitarianism. I must try to convince her that I'm not that bad—that I may have a weak head and a defective heart, but not that. Nance—girl!"
He sat forward in the chair, reaching toward her. She turned her face away, but their hands trembled toward each other, faltering fearfully, tremulously, into a clasp that became at once firm and knowing when it felt itself—as if it opened their blind eyes to a world of life and light without end, a world in which they two were the first to live.
Lingeringly, with slow, regretting fingers, the hands fell apart, to tighten eagerly again into the clasp that made them one flesh.
When at last they were put asunder both arose. The girl patted from her skirts the hammock's little disarranging touches, while the youth again made the careful folds in his hat. Then they shook hands very stiffly, and went opposite ways out of a formal garden of farewell; the youth to sate that beautiful, crude young lust for living—too fierce to be tamed save by its own failures, hearing only the sagas of action, of form and colour and sound made one by heat—the song Nature sings unendingly—but heard only by young ears.
The girl went back to the Crealock piazza to hear of one better set in the grace of faith.