He leaned against the rock and looked up at her with eyes through which the yearning, the hunger, the joy, and the fear of all life were quivering. What a picture she made under the dark cool shadows! Her dress was again of spotless white that seemed now to have been woven out of the foam of the river. Her throat was bare, her cheeks flushed, and her wavy hair the wind had blown loose into a hundred stray ringlets about her face and neck. Her lips were trembling with a smile at his speechless admiration.
“You seem to have been struck dumb,” she said. “Isn’t this glorious?”
“Beyond words, Miss Sallie. I didn’t know there was such a spot on the earth.”
“This is my favourite perch. Art and wealth could never make anything like this! I could come here and sit and dream all day alone if Mama would let me.”
He tried to begin the story of his love, but every time his tongue refused to move. He was trembling with nervous hesitation and began to dig a hole in the sand with his heel.
“What is the matter with you to-day? I never saw you so serious and moody.”
Just then a female mocking-bird in her modest dove-coloured dress lit on a swaying limb whose tips touched the still water of the eddy at their feet, and her proud mate with head erect, far up on the topmost twig of the ash struck softly the first note of his immortal love poem, the dropping song.
“Listen, he’s going to sing his dropping song!” he cried in a whisper.
And they listened. He sang his first stanza in a low dreamy voice, and then as the sweetness of his love and the glory of his triumph grew on his bird soul, he lifted his clear notes higher and higher until the woods on the banks of the river rang with its melody.