Passing the fire, she came straight to Ellis. "It's horrid in there. Don't you hear her? It's muffled, I know, because she's taken the swan to bed with her, and it's asleep, too, and acting as though Professor Rawson's head were a nest-egg. I am not sleepy; I—I believe I shall sit up by this delightful fire all night. Make me a nest of blankets."
Jones and Helen were looking across the fire at them in silence; Ellis unrolled some blankets, made a nest at the foot of the pine full in the fire-glow. Swathed to her smooth white throat, Molly sank into them.
"Now," she said, innocently, "we can talk. Helen! Ask Mr. Jones to make some coffee. Oh, thank you, Mr. Jones! Isn't this perfectly delicious! So simple, so primitive, so sincere"—she looked at Ellis—"so jolly. If the simple life is only a state of mind I can understand how easy it is to follow it to sheerest happiness." And in a low voice, to Ellis: "Can you find happiness in it, too?"
Across the fire Helen called softly to them: "Do you want some toasted cheese, too? Mr. Jones knows how to make it."
A little later, Jones, toasting bread and cheese, heard a sweet voice softly begin the Swan-Song. It was Helen. Molly's lovely, velvet voice joined in; Ellis cautiously tried his barytone; Jones wisely remained mute, and the cheese sizzled a discreet tremolo. It was indeed the swan-song of the heart-whole and fancy-free—the swan-song of the unawakened. For the old order of things was passing away—had passed. And with the moon mounting in silvered splendor over the forest, the newer order of life—the simpler, the sweeter—became so plain to them that they secretly wondered, as they ate their toast and cheese, how they could have lived so long, endured so long, the old and dull complexity of a life through the eventless days of which their hearts had never quickened to the oldest, the most primitive, the simplest of appeals.
And so, there, under the burnished moon, soberly sharing their toasted cheese, the muffled swan-song of the incubating maiden thrilling their enraptured ears, began for them that state of mind in the inviolate mystery of which the passion for the simpler life is hatched.
"If we only had a banjo!" sighed Helen.
"I have a jew's-harp," ventured Jones. "I am not very musical, but every creature likes to emit some sort of melody."
Ellis laughed.
"Why not?" asked Helen Gay, quickly; "after all, what simpler instrument can you wish for?" And she laughed at Jones in a way that left him light-headed.