Seen side-wise like a blossom in the tree;
Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon....”
She stopped and looked off through the leaves to the wide fields where the sun lay.
“Don’t you love it, Hal,” she said, “just the sound of it, the perverse beauty of it? Is there anything more wonderful?”
Hal rolled over upon the flat of his back staring thoughtfully up from the shady chamber of green, the tiny grotto at the cliff-foot, up at the grey old overhanging boulders, like moles and maculations on the brow of an ancient crone, the massy tangle of branches and leaves bursting from among them and cutting off half his vision of the glittering blue heaven, wherein floated great flocks of clouds as artificial in their sheer whiteness and hard outlines as puff-balls on a pool. His muscular brown arms and neck were bare to the white bathing shirt. His bright blonde hair was tousled over his face, which was mature and strong. The girl’s voice made little ripples of pleasure run over his limbs; it gave the words a significance which would never have reached him without her—
“The grass is thick and cool, it lets us lie,
Kissed upon either cheek and either eye.
I turn to thee as some green afternoon
Turns toward sunset and is loth to die;
Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon.”