“To think that I’m only beginning to live when I’ve past forty years!” he exclaimed, as they rolled in the little cart over the forest road.

Laura held the reins, and while she drove he flung his arm about her with a boyish laugh.

“But this is heavenly—­how did you manage it?” he asked.

“Oh, I came alone in the cart because I wanted these first minutes all to ourselves,” she answered, “I didn’t want even Gerty to see how happy we could be.”  And it seemed to her as she spoke that all that she had demanded of happiness was fulfilled at last.

A week later she could still tell herself that the dream was true.  Kemper had thrown himself into his love making with all the zest, as he said, of his college days; and there was in his complete absorption in it something of the exclusive attention he devoted to a game of billiards.  It was a law of his nature that he should live each minute to its utmost and let it go; and this romance of the forest was less an idyl to him than a delicious experience which one must enjoy to the fullest and have over.  There were moments even when Laura saw his temperamental impatience awake in his face, as if his thoughts were beginning already to plunge from the fruition of to-day after the capricious possibility which lies in to-morrow.  In the midst of the forest, under the gold and green of the leaves, she realised at times that his moods were more in harmony with the city streets and the rush of his accustomed eager life.

And yet to Kemper the month was full of an enchantment which belonged half to his actual existence and half to some fairy stories he remembered from his childhood.  It was more beautiful than the reality, but still it was not real; and this very beauty in it reminded him at times of the vanishing loveliness which results from a mere chance effect—­of the sunlight on the green leaves or the flutter of Laura’s blue gown against the balsam.  In the very intensity of his enjoyment there was at certain instants almost a terrified presentiment; and following this there were periods of flagging impulse when he asked himself indifferently if a life of the emotions brought as its Nemesis an essential incapacity for love?  If Laura had only kept up the pursuit a little longer, he complained once in a despondent mood, if she had only fluttered her tinted veil as skilfully as a woman of the world might have done.  “Yet was it not for this unworldliness—­for this lack of artifice in her—­that I first loved her?” he demanded, indignant with her, with nature, with himself.  She had surrendered her soul, he realised, with the frankness of inexperience; the excitement of the chase was now over forever, and he saw stretching ahead of him only the radiant monotony of love.  Was the satiety with which, in these listless instants, he looked forward to it merely, he questioned bitterly, the inevitable end to which his life had reached?

Lying in a hammock on the broad piazza of Gerty’s camp, he asked himself the question while he watched Laura, who stood at a little distance examining some decorations for the hall.