David was too much astonished by these words to answer.  They revealed a mental power which he had not even suspected her of possessing.  He discovered that while she was as ignorant as a child in the realms of thought to which she had been unaccustomed, in her sphere of experience and reflection she was both shrewd and deep.

“You have thought much about this matter,” he said.

“Too much, perhaps.”

“It is deeper than I knew.”

“And so is everything deeper than we know.  Tell me, if you can, why it is that having met you I have lost faith in my art, and having met me you have lost faith in your religion.”

“It is strange.”

“Something must be true.  Do you not think so?”

“I have begun to doubt it.”

“I believe that what you said is true.”

As they stood thus confronting each other, they would have presented a study of equal interest to the artist or to the philosopher.  There was both a poem and a picture in their attitude.  Grace and beauty revealed themselves on every feature and in every movement.  They had arrived at one of those dramatic points in their life-journey, where all the tragic elements of existence seem to converge.  Agitated by incomprehensible and delicious emotions, confronting insoluble problems, longing, hoping, fearing, they hovered over the ocean of life like two tiny sparrows swept out to sea by a tempest.

The familiar objects and landmarks had all vanished.  As children rise in the morning to find the chalk lines, inside of which they had played their game of “hop-scotch,” washed out by the rain, they had awakened to find that the well known pathways and barriers over which and within which they had been accustomed to move had all been obliterated.  They had nothing to guide them and nothing to restrain them except what was written in their hearts, and this mysterious hieroglyph they had not yet learned to decipher.

They were awakened from their reveries by the footsteps of the quack, and by his raucous voice summoning them back into the world of realities from which they had withdrawn so completely.

“Well, little wife,” he said, “how is b-b-business?”

“Fair,” she said, gathering up a double hand-full of change and passing it over to him indifferently.

The question fell upon the ears of the Quaker like a thunder bolt.  It was to him the first intimation that Pepeeta was not the daughter of the quack.  “His wife!” The heart of the youth sank in his bosom.  Here was a new and unexpected complication.  What should he do?  It was too late to turn back now.  The die had been cast, and he must go forward.

The doctor rattled on with an unceasing flow of talk, while the mind of the Quaker plunged into a series of violent efforts to adjust itself to this new situation.  He tried to force himself to be glad that he had been mistaken.  He for the first time fully admitted the significance of the qualms which he felt at permitting himself to regard this strolling gypsy with such feelings as had been in his heart.