"Is it more imperative than the one you give me under my window before I have had less than a good half-night's sleep every morning?" I asked as I crushed a blade of meadow fern in my hands and inhaled its queer tang.
"I await my beloved in
Grain fields.
Come, woman!
In thy eyes is truth.
Thy body must give food with
Sweat of labor, and thy lips
Hold drink for love thirst.
I am thy child.
I am thy mate.
Come!"
Pan took my hand in his as he chanted, and held my fingers to his lips, and ended his chant with several weird, eery, crooning notes blown across his lips and through my fingers out into the moonlit shadows.
"I feel about you just as I do about one of Mrs. Ewe's lambkins," I whispered, with a queer answering laugh in my voice, which held and repeated the croon in his.
"I am thy child.
I am thy mate.
Oh, come!"
again chanted Pan, and it surely wasn't imagination that made me think that the red crests ruffled in the wind. The light in his eyes was unlike anything I had ever seen; it smouldered and flamed like the embers under the pot beside the rock. It drew me until the sleeve of my smock brushed his sleeve of gray flannel. His arms hovered, but didn't quite enclose me.
"And the way I am going to feel about all the little chickens out of the incubator," I added slowly as if the admission was being drawn out of me. Still the arms hovered, the crests ruffled, and the eyes searched down into the depths of me, which had so lately been plowed and harrowed and sown with a new and productive flower.
"And the old twin fathers," I added almost begrudgingly, as I cast him my last treasure.
Then with a laugh that I know was a line-reproduction descended from the one that Adam gave when he first recognized Eve, Pan folded me into his arms, laid his red head on my breast, and held up his lips to mine with a "love-thirst" that it took me more than a long minute to slack to the point of words.
"I knew there was one earth woman due to develop at the first decade of this century, and I've found her," Pan fluted softly as he in turn took me on his breast and pressed his russet cheek against the tan of mine. "I'm going to take her off into the woods and then in a generation salvation for the nation will come forth from the forest."