But the rapture lasted long and it was growing late.  The shadows from the summits of the hills had already crept across the clearing and were silently ascending the trunks of the trees on the eastern side.  It was time for them to go.  She took a step toward him, and then another, moving slowly, reverently, and touched him on the arm.  He started.  The half-closed hand relaxed and the seed fell to the ground, the dreamer woke and descended from the heaven of the spiritual world into that of the earthly, the heart of a pure and noble woman.

“I have come,” she said simply.

He took her in his arms and kissed her.

“Thee is not through yet?”

“So it seems!  I must have lost myself.”

“I think thee rather found thyself.”

“Perhaps I did; but I must finish my labor.  It will never do for me to let my visions supplant my tasks.  They will be hurtful, save as incentives to toil.  I must be careful!”

“Let me help thee.  There are only a few more furrows.  I am sure that I can sow,” she said, extending her hand.

He placed some of the seed in her apron and she trudged by his side, laughing at her awkwardness but laboring with all her might.  Her lover took her hand in his and showed her how to cast the seed, and so they labored together until every open furrow was filled.  It was dark when they were done.  They lingered a little while to put the cabin in order, and then turned their faces towards the old farmhouse.

The two little brooks were singing their evening song as they mingled their waters together in front of that wilderness home.  The lovers stood a moment at their point of junction, as Pepeeta said, “It is a symbol of our lives.”  They listened to the low murmur, watched the crystal stream as it sparkled in the moonlight, stole away into the distance, chanting its own melodious lay of love.  It led them out of the clearing and into the depths of the forest.  They moved like spirits passing through a land of dreams.  The palpable world seemed stripped of its reality.  The creatures that stole across their path or started up as they passed, the crickets that chirped their little idyls at the roots of the great trees, the fire-flies that kindled their evanescent fires among the bushes, the night owls that hooted solemnly in the tree tops, the rustle of the leaves in the evening breeze, the gurgle of the waters over the stones in the bed of the brook, their own muffled footfalls, the patches of moonlight that lay like silver mats on the brown carpet of the woods, the flickering shadows, the ghostly trunks of the trees, the slowly swaying, plume-like branches, sounded only like faint echoes or gleamed only like soft reflections of a fairy world!

“It was here,” Pepeeta said, pausing at the roots of a great beech tree, “that I came the day after we had first seen each other, to inquire of the gypsy goddess the secrets of the future.  I have learned many lessons since!”