She walked as if she loved it. Her long, slender legs moved rhythmically and her arms swung true as pendulums.
The moon was all that Diane had promised. Sheba drank it in happily.
"I believe I must be a pagan. I love the sun and the moon and I know it's all true about the little folk and the pied piper and—"
"If it's paganism to be in love with the world, you are a thirty-third degree pagan."
"Well, and was there ever a more beautiful night before?"
He thought not, but he had not the words to tell her that for him its beauty lay largely in her presence. Her passionate love of things fine and brave transformed the universe for him. It was enough for him to be near her, to hear the laughter bubbling in her throat, to touch her crisp, blue-black hair as he adjusted the scarf about her head.
"God made the night," he replied. "So that's a Christian thought as well as a pagan one."
They were no exception to the rule that lovers are egoists. The world for them to-night divided itself into two classes. One included Sheba O'Neill and Gordon Elliot; the other took in the uninteresting remnant of humanity. No matter how far afield their talk began, it always came back to themselves. They wanted to know all about each other, to compare experiences and points of view. But time fled too fast for words. They talked—as lovers will to the end of time—in exclamations and the meeting of eyes and little endearments.
When Diane and Peter found them on the hilltop, Sheba protested, with her half-shy, half-audacious smile, that it could not be two hours since she and Gordon had left the living-room. Peter grinned. He remembered a hilltop consecrated to his own courtship of Diane.