“I don’t know that we need.” (Why should he be tortured like that!  What did it matter if the rigidity of some of her nightmare-born resolutions got relaxed a little?) “Where do you want to go with me?”

He didn’t answer for a minute, but when he did speak his voice was steady enough.  “There’s a place up on the top of this hill where the trees open out to the east, a lovely place.  I went up there last night after Rush had turned in.  There’ll be a moon along in a few minutes and you can see it come up, from there.  Could we wait for it?—­I suppose Miss Wollaston...”

“No, she’ll be all right,” Mary said.  “Now that she thinks we’re looking for them.”

As she moved up the slope she added, “I’ve a sort of interest in the moon, myself, to-night.”

“Perhaps if you’ll take my hand—­” he said stiffly.  “It is dark here under the trees.”

Her single-minded intention had been to make him a little happier.  She liked him better to-night than ever, and that was saying a lot.  But this elaborate covering up of what he really wanted under the pretended need of guiding her, tried her patience.  The pretense was for himself, too, as much as for her.  He was holding her off at arm’s length behind him as if they were scaling an Alp!

In the spirit of mischief, half irritated, half amused, she crowded up to his side and turned her hand so that their palms lay together.  And she said in a voice evenly matter-of-fact, “That’s nicer, isn’t it?”

He didn’t succeed in producing anything audible in answer to that, but he began presently, and rather at random, to talk.  As if—­she reflected, mutinously,—­some fact that must on no account be looked at would emerge, un-escapable, the moment he stopped.

But the bewitching loveliness of the place he led her to made amends, sponged away her irritation, brought back the Arcadian mood of the day.  A recently fallen apple tree just on the crest of the hill, offered in its crotched arms a seat for both of them.  With an ease which thrilled her he lifted her in his hands to her place and vaulted up beside her.  His arm (excusably, again, for the hand was seeking a hold to steady him), crept around behind her.

Once more he began to talk,—­of nature, of the farm, of how it was the real way to live, as we were meant to.  One couldn’t, of course, cut off the city altogether.  There were concerts and things.  And the companionship of old friends.  Even at that it would be lonely.  They had felt it already.  That was why it was such a marvelous thing to have her here.  She made a different world of it.  Just as she had made what seemed like a home out of that old apple house.  No one could do that but a woman, of course ...

She was no longer irritated by this.  She barely listened, beyond noting his circuitous but certain approach to the point of asking her, once more, to marry him.

Her body seemed drugged with the loveliness of the night, with fatigue, with him, with the immediacy of him,—­but her mind was racing as it does in dreams.