“Art thinking of it all, love?” he said.

“I was wondering what colour of aprons you wore, and if I must make them.”

They began to walk home, passing now under the sumac’s palm-like canopy, and they saw the blue gleam of the singing river through red thickets.  Soon they came to a bit of open ground, all overgrown with bronzed bracken, and maidenhair sere and pink, and blue-eyed asters and golden-rod.  So high and thick were the breeze-blown weeds that the only place to set the feet was a very narrow path.  Here Sophia walked first, for they could not walk abreast, and as Alec watched her threading her way with light elastic step, he became afraid once more, and tried to break through her happy tranquillity.

“Dear love,” he said, “I hope—­”

“What now?” said she, for his tone was unrestful.

He trampled down flowers and ferns as he awkwardly tried to gain her side.

“You know, dear, I have a sort of feeling that I’ve perhaps just fascinated and entranced you—­so that you are under a spell and don’t consider, you know.”

It was exactly what he meant, and he said it; but how merrily she laughed!  Her happy laughter rang; the river laughed in answer, and the woodpecker clapped applause.

But Alec blushed very much and stumbled upon the tangled weeds.

“I only meant—­I—­I didn’t mean—­That is the way I feel fascinated by you, you know; and I suppose it might be the same—­”

They walked on, she still advancing a few paces because she had the path, he retarded because, in his attempt to come up with her, he was knee-deep in flowers.  But after a minute, observing that he was hurt in his mind because of her laughter, she mocked him, laughing again, but turned the sunshine of her loving face full upon him as she did so.

“Most fascinating and entrancing of butchers!” quoth she.

With that as she entered another thicket of sumac trees, he caught and kissed her in its shade.

* * * * *

And there was one man who heard her words and saw his act, one who took in the full meaning of it even more clearly than they could, because they in their transport had not his clearness of vision.  Robert Trenholme, coming to seek them, chanced in crossing this place, thick set with shrubs, to come near them unawares, and seeing them, and having at the sight no power in him to advance another step or speak a word, he let them pass joyously on their way towards home.  It was not many moments before they had passed off the scene, and he was left the only human actor in that happy wilderness where flower and leaf and bird, the blue firmament on high and the sparkling river, rejoiced together in the glory of light and colour.

Trenholme crossed the path and strode through flowery tangle and woody thicket like a giant in sudden strength, snapping all that offered to detain his feet.  He sought, he knew not why, the murmur and the motion of the river; and where young trees stood thickest, as spearsmen to guard the loneliness of its bank, he sat down upon a rock and covered his face, as if even from the spirits of solitude and from his own consciousness he must hide.  He thought of nothing:  his soul within him was mad.