“What does she call being vague and fantastic?”

“Not wanting any husband.”

“Oh!”

“Bernal, it’s like the time that you ran off when you were a wee thing—­to be bad.”

“And you cried because I wouldn’t take you with me.”

“I can feel the woe of it yet.”

“You’re dry-eyed now, Nance.”

“Yes—­and the pink parasol and the buff shoes I meant to take with me are also things of the past.  Mercy!  The idea of going off with an unbeliever to be bad and—­everything!  ’The happy couple are said to look forward to a life of joyous wickedness, several interesting crimes having been planned for the coming season.  For their honeymoon infamy they will perpetrate a series of bank-robberies along the Maine coast.’  There—­how would that sound?”

“You’re right, Nance—­I wouldn’t take you this time either, even if you cried.  And your little speech is funny and all that—­but Nance, I believe, these last years, we’ve both thought of things now and then—­things, you know—­things to think of and not talk of—­and see here—­The man was driven out of the garden—­but not the woman.  She isn’t mentioned.  She could stay there—­”

“Until she got tired of it herself?”

“Until the man came back for her.”

He thought her face was glowing duskily in the twilight.

“I wonder—­wonder about so many things,” she said softly.

“I believe you’re a sleeping rebel yourself, Nance.  If ever you do eat from that tree, there’ll be no holding you.  You won’t wait to be driven forth!”

“And you are, a wicked young man—­that kind never comes back in the stories.”

“That may be no jest, Nance.  I should surely be wicked, if I thought it brings the happiness it’s said to.  Under this big sky I am free from any moral law that doesn’t come from right here inside me.  Can you realize that?  Do I seem bad for saying it?  What they call the laws of God are nothing.  I suspect them all, and I’ll make every one of them find its authority in me before I obey it.”

“It sounds—­well—­unpromising, Bernal.”

“I told you it was serious, Nance.  I see but one law clearly—­I am bound to want happiness.  Every man is bound always to want happiness, Nance.  No man can possibly want anything else.  That’s the only thing under heaven I’m sure of at this moment—­the one universal law under which we all make our mistakes—­good people and bad alike?”

“But, Bernal, you wouldn’t be bad—­not really bad?”

“Well, Nance, I’ve a vague, loose sort of notion that one isn’t really compelled to be bad in order to be happy right here on earth.  I know the Church rather intimates this, but I suspect that vice is not the delicious thing the Church implies it to be.”

“You make me afraid, Bernal—­”

“But if I do come back, Nance, having toiled?”

“—­and you make me wonder.”