All Nature lived to her then.  There was life in the very rocks under her feet, language in the very shimmer of the waters, a music, as the ancients dreamed in the glittering spheres that circled there in space.  The moon had something to say to her, something to tell her, something she longed to hear and shrank from hearing.  She knew she was not herself somehow, not her old self, that it was as though she were being bewitched, mesmerised, drawn out of herself by some strange influence, sweet though fearful.  Suddenly a distant clock struck and recalled her wandering thoughts.

“Half-past!  Half-past eleven I suppose!  I thought it was later, ever so much later.  It has seemed like hours, it is so beautiful here, but we haven’t been here many minutes,” she said.  Adding incongruously:  “Let’s go.  It’s getting very late.”  She spoke decidedly.  She felt that she dare not stay; why, she had not the least idea.

Then she heard Ned, who was standing there, rigid, except that he was twirling his soft straw hat round and round in his fingers, say in a low tremulous husky whisper: 

“Nellie!”

Then she knew.

She was loved and she loved.  That was what the stars sang and the little ripples and the leaves.  That was what the hard rock knew and what the shimmer of the water laughed to think of and what the glowing moon had to tell her as it swam high in heaven, looking down into her heart and swelling its tumultuous tide.  The moon knew, the full moon that ever made her pulse beat strong and her young life throb till its throbbing was a pain, the full white moon that, dethroned on earth, still governs from the skies the lives of women.  She was loved.  She was loved.  And she, who had vowed herself to die unmarried, she loved, loved, loved.

She knew that those only laugh at Love to whom the fullness of living has been denied, in whose cold veins, adulterate with inherited disease, a stagnant liquid mocks the purpose of the rich red blood of a healthy race; that in that laugh of theirs is the, knell of them and of their people; that the nation which has ceased to love has almost ceased to live.

She knew that every breath she had ever drawn had been drawn that she might live for this moment; that every inch of her stature and every ounce of her muscle and every thought of her brain had built up slowly, surely, ultimately, this all-absorbing passion; that upon her was the hand of the Infinite driving her of her own nature to form a link in the great Life-chain that stretches from the Whence into the Whither, to lose herself in the appointed lot as the coral insect does whose tiny body makes a continent possible.

She knew that Love is from the beginning and to all time, knew that it comes to each as each is, to the strong in strength and to the weak in weakness.  She knew that to her it had come with all the force of her grand physique and vigorous brain and dominant emotionality, that in her heart one man, one hero, one lover, was enshrined and that to him she would be loyal and true for ever and ever, choosing death rather than to fail him.