She shook her head and spoke wonderingly with a far-away, detached sort of utterance.  “I don’t know what it was—­I guess I was a little faint.”  But she still stood with an awed and bewildered fixity upon her face and after a little while, he asked slowly: 

“Did you ever seem to see and hear something as though it had come out of a different life; as though you were living it over again?”

He smiled and shook his head.  “I’ve often heard of such things,” he reassured.  She had been nursing her mother through a long illness; perhaps, he thought, the strain had left her nervous.

“It was as real as if it had truly happened,” she assured him as she put up both hands and pressed her fingers against her temples.  “You were standing there—­right where you are standing now, and you smiled—­like you smiled at me that day in the road....  There were little wrinkles around your eyes.”

“That is all real enough,” he laughed.  “I was and am doing all those things.”

“Yes, I know, but—­” Once more she shook her head and her voice carried the detached tone of a trance-like vagueness—­“but somehow it was all different.  You were you—­and I was I—­and yet we were in another life ... we didn’t seem to belong here ... and there seemed to be some terrible danger hanging over us.”

“Did we seem to talk?” he asked her.

“Yes.”  The girl’s words came very low but with a tense emphasis.  “You said, ’Maybe there’s some land beyond the stars where every mistake we make here can be remedied ... where we can take up our marred lives and live them afresh as we have dreamed them.  Perhaps in that other world we can go back to the turning of the road where we lost our ways and choose the other path.’ You said that and then after a moment you smiled again.”

“It’s strange,” said the young man.  He unconsciously took off his hat, baring the curly hair over the tanned face.  He was very wholesome and honest and strong, and the girl’s eyes lighted into a smile of pride and love.

“Yes,” she said.  “It was you and me—­in some other life.  I don’t know what it means—­but somehow it seems to—­to guarantee everything.”

They turned and walked together to the last buggy hitched against the stone wall under the wild apple trees.

After a while she demanded—­“After you got well—­why did you stay here?” and as promptly as an echo came his answer—­

“Because you stayed.”

* * * * *

The moon was up early that night and it flooded the mountains with a glory of silver mists.  The shoulders of the peaks stood out in blue barriers, strong, abiding, beautiful.  In the valleys it was all a nocturne of dove grays and dreamlike softness.  The stars, too, shone down in a million splinters of happy light, but the radiance of the moon paled them.

The vines which covered the walls of the Burton house hung out their lacy tendrils and through the windows came the soft glow of lamplight.