Elsewhere on this globe some three thousand millions of souls were coming and going on the ordinary business of life at trade, barter; feasting or fasting; mourning or making merry; dying, some hundreds of them, every second, to make way for a new spawn of life. Beyond the blue loom of the mountains men were robbing and murdering, hunting one another like beasts of the jungle in the name of this or that “cause”; committing frightful infamies in the sacred name of love. Swaying hither and thither, that tide of lust and carnage might sweep at any moment over these sunlit plains.
Yet, blind to it all, oblivious of the past and future, conscious only of the present that had bloomed in sudden glory, sufficient to themselves as the first man and woman in Eden, they rode forward lost in an illumined dream.
It lasted, that wonderful, bright ecstasy, until, turning up her face, he made to kiss her. Then, by a thought of Ramon, was she abruptly recalled to unpleasant realities. She laid a determined, if gentle, hand over his mouth.
“You mustn’t.”
“Why?”
“You forget—I am still engaged.”
“Why—so you are!” Laughing, he tried to dodge her hand, but desisted when he saw she was in earnest. “You surely don’t intend—”
“No, indeed!” She read his thought. “I had believed, at first, that I ought. But Mrs. Mills showed me how unfair it would be to marry Ramon while—”
“Say it.”
“While I loved you.”