The shadows were doubly dense here, and Persis hung back, but Forbes laughed at her for a poltroon, and she refused to take the dare. He was so afraid that she might fall that he finally suggested:
"If you are afraid of stumbling here, I—I'm not forgetting my promise; but I just wanted to say that I—I don't mind holding on to you, if you want to ask me to."
She declined with whispered thanks. Down, down the walk drifted. At length they heard a murmur—the mysteriously musical noise of a fountain. They rounded a few more curves and came upon a niched Cupid riding a dolphin, from whose mouth an arc of water poured with a sound of chuckling laughter. The green patina that covered the bronze was uncannily beautiful in the moonlight, and the water was molten silver.
They stood and watched it like children for a long while. Then Forbes urged Persis along to the lowest of the circular levels.
There he led her to a bench and dropped down beside her. They both looked off into the huge caldron of the hills, filled with moonlight as with a mist.
The ragged woods in the distance were superb now in blue velvet. Everything was ennobled—rewritten in poetry. Everything plain and simple and ugly took on splendor and mystic significance. Every object, every group of objects, became personal and seemed to be striving to say something.
Persis and Forbes sat worshiping like Parsees of the moon, in awesome silence, till Forbes could no longer hush the clamor in his heart.
"Miss Cabot," he said, "I promised not to annoy you. Would it annoy you if I told you that—that I love you with all my heart and soul and being?"
"How could you love me?" she answered, softly, hoping to be contradicted. "You've known me only a few days."
"There are some people we live with for years and never like nor understand; others we know and love the moment our eyes meet."