“I will tell thee sometime; it is too late now.  There is my home and I have much work to do before dark.”

“Home!” she echoed.  “I never had a home, or at least I cannot remember it.  We have always led a roving life, here to-day and gone to-morrow.  It must be sweet to have a home!”

“Thee has always led a roving life and wishes to have a home?  I have always had a home, and wish to lead a roving life,” said David.

They looked at each other and smiled at this curious contradiction.  They smiled because they were not yet old enough to weep over the restlessness of the human heart.

Having reached the edge of the woods, where their paths separated, they paused.

“We must part,” said David.

“Yes; but we shall meet to-morrow.”

“We shall meet to-morrow.”

“You are sure?”

“I am sure.”

“You will not change your mind?”

“I could not if I would.”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

At the touch of their hands their young hearts were swayed by tender and tumultuous feelings.  A too strong pressure startled them, and they loosened their grasp.  The sun sank behind the hill.  The shadows that fell upon their faces awakened them from their dreams.  Again they said goodbye and reluctantly parted.  Once they stopped and, turning, waved their hands; and the next moment Pepeeta entered the road which led her out of sight.

In this interview, the entire past of these two lives seemed to count for nothing.

If Pepeeta had never seen anything of the world; if she had issued from a nunnery at that very moment, she could not have acted with a more utter disregard of every principle of safety.

It was the same with David.  The fact that he had been reared a Quaker; that he had been dedicated to God from his youth; that he had struggled all his days to be prepared for such a moment as this, did not affect him to the least degree.

The seasoning of the bow does not invariably prevent it from snapping.  The drill on the parade ground does not always insure, courage for the battle.  Nothing is more terrible than this futility of the past.

Such scenes as this discredit the value of experience, and attach a terrible reality to the conclusion of Coleridge, that “it is like the stern-light of a vessel—­illuminating only the path over which we have traveled.”

Nor did the future possess any more power over their destinies than the past.  Not a conscious foreboding disturbed their enjoyment of that brief instant which alone can be called the present.

And yet, no moment in their after lives came up more frequently for review than this one, and in the light of subsequent events they were forced to recognize that during every instant of this scene there was an uneasy but unacknowledged sense of danger and wrong thrilling through all those emotions of bliss.