“I'll come to-morrow,” she said—then with a little mischievous laugh, “if that'll make you talk.”
“You must think I'm awfully stupid,” agreed Thorpe bitterly.
“Ah, no! Ah, no!” she protested softly. “You must not say that.”
She was looking at him very tenderly, if he had only known it, but he did not, for his face was set in discontented lines straight before him.
“It is true,” he replied.
They walked on in silence, while gradually the dangerous fascination of the woods crept down on them. Just before sunset a hush falls on nature. The wind has died, the birds have not yet begun their evening songs, the light itself seems to have left off sparkling and to lie still across the landscape. Such a hush now lay on their spirits. Over the way a creeper was droning sleepily a little chant,—the only voice in the wilderness. In the heart of the man, too, a little voice raised itself alone.
“Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart!” it breathed over and over again. After a while he said it gently in a half voice.
“No, no, hush!” said the girl, and she laid the soft, warm fingers of one hand across his lips, and looked at him from a height of superior soft-eyed tenderness as a woman might look at a child. “You must not. It is not right.”
Then he kissed the fingers very gently before they were withdrawn, and she said nothing at all in rebuke, but looked straight before her with troubled eyes.
The voices of evening began to raise their jubilant notes. From a tree nearby the olive thrush sang like clockwork; over beyond carolled eagerly a black-throat, a myrtle warbler, a dozen song sparrows, and a hundred vireos and creepers. Down deep in the blackness of the ancient woods a hermit thrush uttered his solemn bell note, like the tolling of the spirit of peace. And in Thorpe's heart a thousand tumultuous voices that had suddenly roused to clamor, died into nothingness at the music of her softly protesting voice.