Nature was not, of course, the gentle sentimentalist Graham was talking about, but one did get something out of close communion with her.  A sense of fundamentals.  She was a—­simplifier of ideas.  Plain and straightforward even in her enchantments.  That moon they were waiting for....  Already she was looking down upon a pair of lovers, somewhere,—­a thousand pairs!—­with her bland unseeing face.  And later to-night, long after she had risen on them, upon a thousand more.

Of lovers?  Well perhaps not.  Not if one insisted upon the poets’ descriptions.  But good enough for nature’s simple purposes.  Answering to a desire, faint or imperious, that would lead them to put on her harness.  Take on her work.

Anthony March had never put on a harness.  A rebel.  And for the price of his rebellion never had heard his music, except in his head.  Clear torment they could be, he had told her, those unheard melodies.  Somehow she could understand that.  There was an unheard music in her.  An unfulfilled destiny, at all events, which was growing clamorous as the echo of the boy’s passion-if it were but an echo-pulsed in her throat, drew her body down by insensible relaxations closer upon his.

The moon came up and they watched it, silent.  The air grew heavy.  The call of a screech-owl made all the sound there was.  She shivered and he drew her, unresisting, tighter still.  Then he bent down and kissed her.

He said, presently, in a strained voice, “You know what I have been asking.  Does that mean yes?”

She did not speak.  The moon was up above the trees, yellow now.  She remembered a great broad voice, singing: 

“Low hangs the moon.  It rose late. 
It is lagging-O I think it is heavy with love, with love”

With a passion that had broken away at last, the boy’s hands took possession of her.  He kissed her mouth, hotly, and then again; drew back gasping and stared into her small pale face with burning eyes.  Her head turned a little away from him.

“...  Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me
 My mate back again if you only would,
 For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look. 
 O rising stars!...”

The languor was gone.  She shivered and sat erect, he watching her in an agony of apprehension.  She looked slowly round at him.

“You haven’t answered!” His voice broke over that into a sob.  “Will you marry me, Mary?”

“I don’t know,” she said dully, like one struggling out of a dream.  “I will if I can.  I meant to for a while, I think.  But ...”

He leaped to the ground and stood facing her with clenched hands.  “I ought to be shot,” he said.  “I’m not fit to touch you—­a white thing like you.  I didn’t mean to.  Not like that.  I meant ...”

She stared for an instant, totally at a loss for the meaning—­the mere direction of what he was trying to say.  Then, slipping down from the branch, she took him by the arms.  “Don’t!” she cried rather wildly.  “Don’t talk like that!  That’s the last impossibility.  Listen.  I’m going to tell you why.”