voices.  They heard the tones of a girl, trembling with sweetness and delight, foolish with the blessed folly of life and youth.  The voice was so full of joy that at first it sounded no more articulate than a bird’s song.  It was like a strophe from the primeval language of all languages.  Henry and Meeks seemed to understand, finally, what the voice said, more from some inner sympathy, which dated back to their youth and chorded with it, than from any actual comprehension of spoken words.

This was what the sweet, divinely foolish girl-voice said:  “I don’t know what you can see in me to love.”

There was nothing in the words; it was what any girl might say; it was very trite, but it was a song.  Celestial modesty and pride were in it, and joy which looked at itself and doubted if it were joy.

Then came the man’s voice, and that sang a song also foolish and trite, but divine and triumphant and new as every spring.

Henry and Meeks saw gradually, as they listened, afraid to move lest they be heard.  They saw Horace and Rose sitting on the green turf under an apple-tree.  They leaned against its trunk, twisted with years of sun and storm, and the green spread of branches was overhead, and they were all dappled with shade and light like the gold bosses of a shield.  The man’s arm was around the girl, and they were looking at each other and seeing this world and that which is to come.

Suddenly Meeks gave Henry’s arm another violent clutch.  He pointed.  Then they saw another girl standing in the tangle of wild grapes.  She wore a green muslin gown, and was so motionless that it was not easy to discern her readily.  She was listening and watching the lovers, and her young face was terrible.  It was full of an enormous, greedy delight, as of one who eats ravenously, and yet there was malignity and awful misery and unreason in it.  Her cheeks were flushed and her blue eyes glittered.  It was evident that everything she heard and saw caused her the most horrible agony and a more horrible joy.  She was like a fanatic who dances in fire.

Meeks and Henry looked at her for a long minute, then at each other.  Henry nodded as if in response to a question.  Then the two men, moving by almost imperceptible degrees, keeping the utmost silence, hearing all the time that love duet on the other side of the grape-vines, got behind the girl.  She had been so intent that there had been no danger of seeing them.  Horace and Rose were also so intent that they were not easily reached by any sight or sound outside themselves.

Meeks noiselessly and firmly clasped one of Lucy Ayres’s arms.  It was very slender, and pathetically cold through her thin sleeve.  Henry grasped the other.  She turned her wild young face over her shoulder, and saw them, and yielded.  Between them the two men half carried, half led the girl away across the fields to the road.  When they were on the road Henry released his grasp of her arm, but Meeks retained his.  “Will you go quietly home?” said he, “or shall Mr. Whitman and I go with you?”