Passing through the little village since called Avondale, they turned down what is now the Clinton Springs road, climbed a hill, descended its other slope, and came upon an old spring house where, as they paused to drink, David scratched their names with his penknife on one of the stones of the walls, where they may be read to-day.

Leaving the turnpike, they entered a grove through which flowed a noisy stream; cast themselves upon a bank, bathed their faces, ate their lunch and rested.  There for a few moments, in the tranquil and uplifting influence of the silence and the solitude, all that was best in their natures came to the surface.  Pepeeta nestled down among the roots of a great beech tree, her hat flung upon the ground by her side, her arms folded across her bosom, her face upturned like a flower drinking in the sunshine or the rain.  At her feet her lover reclined, his head upon his arms and his gaze fixed upon the canopy of leaves which spread above them and through which as the branches swayed in the breeze he caught glimpses of the sky.

Pepeeta broke the silence.  “I could stay here forever,” she said.  “I nestle here in the roots of this great tree like a little child in the arms of its mother.  I feel that everything around me is my friend.  I feel, not as if I were different from other things, but as if I were a part of them.  Do you comprehend?  Do you feel that way?”

“More than at any time since leaving home,” he said.  “That was the way I always felt in the old days—­how far away they seem!  I could then sit for hours beside a brook like this, and thoughts of God would flow over my soul like water over the stones; and now I do not think of Him at all!  It was by a brook like this that we first met.  Do you remember, Pepeeta?”

“I shall never forget.”

“Are you sure?”

“As certain as that I live.”

“Sure—­certain!  Of what are we sure but the present moment?  Into it we ought to crowd all the joys of existence.”

Her feminine instinct discovered the return of his thoughts into the old dangerous channel, and her quick wit diverted them.

“Tell me more about your home, and how you felt when you used to sit like this and think.”

He determined to yield himself for a little while longer to her will, and said:  “In those days Nature possessed for me an irresistible fascination; but the spell is broken now.  I then thought that I was face to face with the eternal spirit of the universe.  How far I have drifted away from the world in which I then existed!  I could never return to it.  I am like a bird which has broken its shell and which can never be put back again.  I have found another face into which I now look with still deeper wonder than into that of Nature, and which exerts a still deeper fascination.  It is the face of a woman, in whom all the beauties of nature seem to be mirrored.  She is everything to me; she is the entire universe embodied in a gentle heart.”