“I think that’s all either of us can do, Nance, and I must go.  I have to say good-bye to Clytie yet.  The poor soul is convinced that I have become a Unitarian and that there’s a conspiracy to keep the horrible truth from her.  She says grandad evaded her questions about it.  She doesn’t dream there are depths below Unitarianism.  I must try to convince her that I’m not that bad—­that I may have a weak head and a defective heart, but not that.  Nance—­girl!”

He sat forward in the chair, reaching toward her.  She turned her face away, but their hands trembled toward each other, faltering fearfully, tremulously, into a clasp that became at once firm and knowing when it felt itself—­as if it opened their blind eyes to a world of life and light without end, a world in which they two were the first to live.

Lingeringly, with slow, regretting fingers, the hands fell apart, to tighten eagerly again into the clasp that made them one flesh.

When at last they were put asunder both arose.  The girl patted from her skirts the hammock’s little disarranging touches, while the youth again made the careful folds in his hat.  Then they shook hands very stiffly, and went opposite ways out of a formal garden of farewell; the youth to sate that beautiful, crude young lust for living—­too fierce to be tamed save by its own failures, hearing only the sagas of action, of form and colour and sound made one by heat—­the song Nature sings unendingly—­but heard only by young ears.

The girl went back to the Crealock piazza to hear of one better set in the grace of faith.

“That elder young Linford,” began Aunt Bell, ceasing to rock, “has a future.  You know I talked to him about the Episcopal Church, strongly advising him to enter it.  For all my broad views”—­Aunt Bell sighed here—­“I really and truly believe, child, that no one not an Episcopalian is ever thoroughly at ease in this world.”

Aunt Bell was beautifully, girlishly plump, with a sophisticated air of smartness—­of coquetry, indeed—­as to her exquisitely small hands and feet; and though a certain suggestion of melancholy in her tone harmonised with the carefully dressed gray hair and with her apparent years, she nevertheless breathed airs of perfect comfort.

“Of course this young chap could see at once,” she went on, “what immensely better form it is than Calvinism. Dear me!  Imagine one being a Presbyterian in this day!” It seemed here that the soul of Aunt Bell poised a disdainful lorgnette before its eyes, through which to survey in a fitting manner the unmodish spectacle of Calvinism.

“And he tells me that he has his grandfather’s consent.  Really, my dear, with his physique and voice and manner that fellow undoubtedly has a future in the Episcopal Church.  I dare say he’ll be wearing the lawn sleeves and rochet of a bishop before he’s forty.”

“Did it ever occur to you, Aunt Bell, that he is—­well, just the least trifle—­I was going to say, vain of his appearance—­but I’ll make it ’self-conscious’?”