Ella had gone to bed with the birds. Except the two readers, all the world might have been asleep. Their breathing, and the tick of a death watch in the wall, made the only sounds in house or valley. For all the window stood open, the little blade of light between them reared without wavering. This silence at full stretch, this preposterous calmness at close range, were alike unreal and unbearable. His book appeared to be “The Polar and Tropical Worlds,” a treasury of boyhood; but the pictures swam in a blur—icebergs, gorillas, the open coffin on Spitzbergen, the march of land-crabs through a palm-grove, all an empty jumble. Sometimes his eyesight escaped the page; but then perhaps he found her looking up, by the same chance; caught for an instant, as her eyes dropped, the last of a pitiful, appealing light; and plunged into his book again, like a desperate man hunting a text of divination.
He might thus have turned a hundred pages, and she none at all, when the contest ended. There came a stir, a little broken sound, abrupt and choking, which tugged at his heart more than words.
“Oh,” she sobbed, “where can I go next?” and dropped head upon arms, across the open volume.
As though a musket were shot off in the room, his chair had struck the floor. He circled the table and caught her up, in a gust that sent the candle-light reeling.
“Oh, what a wretched girl!” she cried, her voice stifled in his jacket.
All the inevitable drift of their summer, the whole multitude of their hidden motives, shone clear before and about them,—a wide, manifold peace in the tumult, like a field of daisies seen by lightning.
