"It dies," Sommers replied. "Burnt out!"
"No," she protested eagerly; "it remains in the heart, warming it in dull, cold times, and its great work comes after. It is not well to live without fierceness and passion."
The last lights from the fire flickered over her dark hair and sombre face. She was breathing heavily close by his side, throwing into the soft night a passionate warmth of feeling. It set his pulses beating in response.
"You are so insistent upon happiness," the man cried.
"Yes," she nodded. "To die out without this"—her hand pointed to the blackened Court of Honor—"is to have lived unfulfilled. That is what I felt as a child in the rich fields of Wisconsin, as a girl at the chapel of the seminary."
And she began, as if to explain herself, to tell the story of the Wisconsin farm, sleeping heavily in the warm sun among the little lakes; of the crude fervor that went on under the trees of the quiet seminary hill; of the little chapel with its churchyard to the west, commanding the lakes, the woods, the rising bosom of hills. The story was disconnected, lapsing into mere exclamations, rising to animated description as one memory wakened another in the chain of human associations. Bovine, heavy, and animal, yet peaceful, was that picture of Wisconsin farm lands, saturated with a few strong impressions,—the scents of field and of cattle, the fertile soil, and the broad-shouldered men, like Holstein cattle.
The excitement of the evening had set free the heart, and a torrent of feelings and memories surged up,—disordered, turbulent, yet strangely unified by the simple nature, the few aims of the being that held them. The waters of the past had been gathering these past weeks, and now she found peace in their release, in the abandonment of herself through speech. The night crept on, cooler now and clouded, the heavens covered with filaments of gray lace; the horse tied near by stamped and whinnied. But the two sitting on the shore of the silent lake felt neither the passing of time nor the increasing cold of the night.
At the end of her tale the dominant note sounded once more: "Eight or wrong, happiness! for if we make happiness in the world, we know God. God lives upon our happiness."
This belief, which seemed laboriously gathered from the tears of tortured experience, had become an obsession. She was silent, brooding over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,—an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for this evanescent treasure of joy.
"If you think that—if your whole story turns out that way—why did you—"
But he paused, unwilling to force her by a brutal proof of illogicality.