There was a light breeze from the direction of camp. It swung the two canoes gradually around, and propelled them slowly up the lake. The moon now shone in Nahnya's face. Like the brush of a master-painter it blotted out unessential detail in order to reveal in dim, suggestive lights and shadows the very spirit of beauty dwelling there. Ralph thought he had already encompassed her beauty and he was amazed. He leaned toward her, gazing like a despairing sinner at a vision of heaven. There was a long silence.
It terrified Nahnya. Obliged to say something, anything to break it, in her agitation she said the wrong thing. "It is late. We must go back."
"Late!" cried Ralph, suddenly finding speech. "What does it matter! What does anything matter! I must speak to you. There will never be another night, another time like this!"
Again the sweet and terrible silence that discharged lightnings from heart to heart. Nahnya, half-swooning, still resisted the current desperately.
"I must go," she murmured, and picked up her paddle.
Ralph clung to her canoe. She could not escape him.
"That was a wonderful story you told me," he murmured at last.
This provided her a loophole of escape from the tender influences that betrayed her. "Wonderful!" she said in a stronger voice, and bitterly. "It is an ugly story!"
"Ugly for the beasts of white men you were thrown among!" he cried with rising indignation that half suffocated him. "I always hated the life of cities. Now I am ashamed of my race into the bargain. Nahnya, if I could make it up to you in some way!"
"It is nothing to me now," she said quickly.