"This is different," he said, with a wave of his hand overhead at the myriad-eyed night. "You can't run away from this! The rest—houses, people, rotten brutality, useless things, yes; that's what I like to go plunging from—to get to this. I like the feeling—solitude. George! if you could only go steering your way out of all the old into something new!" He repeated the phrase moodily, as if to himself: "If one only could—if it were only possible!" Then he broke off abruptly, laughing to himself: "You're too young. You can't understand. Everything is new to you. By George, marry me and start for Australia, or Timbuctoo, to-morrow! What do you say?"
"Look out! I might accept!" she said, laughing, and yet understanding.
"Every one thinks I'm a wild ass," he said grimly. "Wish I could do something really wild—make over the world! Look here; are you going to answer my question?"
"What question?"
"Why in the name of the impossible are we here to-night?"
"I wonder?" she said, half to herself.
The reply seemed to satisfy him; he continued a moment, absorbed in their smooth progress. Insensibly she felt her mood yielding to his, no longer impatient, vaguely content, lulled into reverie, giving herself over to a new strange companionable inclination toward the man who had revealed himself, half boy, half savage, in his first unconscious longings.
To escape from the old? No, she did not yet understand that; but she did comprehend the all-pervading serenity of the night, warm still with the touch of Indian summer. The grating strident sounds of the day were gone; the whisper on the wind was soft as a lullaby—sharp angles and brutally straight lines lost in the feathery suffusion that lay on the fields. Ahead, the brave steadfast rays of their lamps pierced through sudden pools of darkness, that closed gently above them, and gave way again to clear visions of stars. Once or twice she saw across the enchanted blackness a distant trolley, unheard, rolling its ball of fire like the track of a shooting star. Again, the far-off leathery bark of a watch-dog complaining. But of man no sound. Only the mysterious shadows held a spirit of life; only a giant tree, silhouetted against the faint sky, seemed to move as they moved, racing with them past the vanishing road bushes. A rabbit, started from its security, horribly hypnotized by this chugging, fiery-eyed monster, scurried foolishly before them. Once a swerving bat zigzagged before her eyes like the cut of a black whirling blade. Even these were intruders, out of place in the old world, older than the pyramids, older than the first stirring of life—this waiting dominion of time, which reclaimed each night the futile centuries of men, secure of the hour when all must return in loyalty to its first silence. She looked at the stars, and the world beneath dwindled into nothingness, to the span of a hand before these twinking immensities. Which was real? This night, where only the infinite and the inevitable reigned, or the day, with its clamoring intrusion of confusing and needless voices?
She put her hand on his arm.
"It's so strange. It's so long since I remembered. I had forgot!"