"Lion—gone? Oh, what shall we do?"
"Ill pull the wagon down when I want to go back for food."
"Pull it?"
"Won't need much pulling! It will go down by itself. If I put you in it, I'll have to rope a log on behind as a brake, or it would run over me! I bet I give Edith a piece of my mind, when I get hold of her. But it doesn't really matter. I think I like it better to have not even Lion. Just you—and the stars. They are beginning to prick out," he said. He stretched himself on the ground beside her, his hands clasped under his head, and his happy eyes looking up into the abyss. "Sing, Star, sing!" he said. So she sang, softly:
How many times do I love again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain
Unraveled from the tumbling main
And threading the eye of a yellow star—
So many times—
"It looks," she broke off, "a little black in the west? And—was that lightning?"
"Only heat lightning. And if it should storm,—I have you here, in my arms, alone!" He turned and caught her to him, and his mouth crushed hers. Her eyes closed, and her passion answered his, and all that he whispered. Yet while he kissed her, her eyes opened and she looked furtively beyond him, toward that gathering blackness.
They lay there together in the starlit dark, for a long time, his head on her breast. Sometimes she thrilled at his touch or low word, and sometimes she held his hand against her lips and kissed it—which made him protest—but suddenly he said, "By George! Nelly, I believe we are going to have a shower!"
Instantly she was alert with fright, and sat up, and looked down into the valley, where the heat lightning, which had been winking along the line of the hills, suddenly sharpened into a flash. "Oh!" she said, and held her breath until, from very far off, came a faint grumble of thunder. "Oh, Maurice!" she said, "it is horrible to be out here—if it thunders!"
"We won't be. Well go into the cabin, and we'll hear the rain on the roof, and the clash of the branches; and we'll see the lightning through the chinks—and I'll have you! Oh, Nelly, we shall be part of the storm!—and nothing in God's world can separate us."