The fields were divided from one another by stone walls.  Lucina crossed these, and kept on until she reached a field some distance beyond Doctor Prescott’s house.  Then she left the shadow of the wood, and crossed the field to the main road.  In crossing this she kept close to the wall, slinking along rapidly, for she felt guilty; this field was all waving with brown heads of millet which should not have been trampled.

She got to the road and nobody had seen her.  She crossed it, entered a rutty cart-path, and was in the Edwards’ woodland.

For the first time in her life, Lucina Merritt was doing something which she acknowledged to herself to be distinctly unmaidenly.  She had come to this wood because she had heard Jerome say that he often strolled here of a Sunday afternoon.  Her previous little schemes for meeting him had been innocent to her own understanding, but now she had tasted the fruit of knowledge of her own heart.

She felt fairly sick with shame at what she was doing, she blushed to her own thoughts, but she had a helpless impulse as before, some goading spur in her own nature which she could not withstand.

She hurried softly down the cart-path between the trees, then suddenly stood still, for under a great pine-tree on the right lay Jerome.  His hat was off, one arm was thrown over his head, his face was flushed with heat and slumber.  Lucina, her body bent aloof with an indescribable poise of delicacy and the impulse of flight, yet looked at her sleeping lover until her whole heart seemed to feed itself through her eyes.

Lucina had not seen him for more than six weeks, except by sly glimpses at meeting and on the road.  She thought, pitifully, that he had grown thin; she noticed what a sad droop his mouth had at the corners.  She pitied, loved, and feared him, with all the trifold power of her feminine heart.

As she looked at him, her remembrance of old days so deepened and intensified that they seemed to close upon the present and the future.  Love, even when it has apparently no past, is at once a memory and a revelation.  Lucina saw the little lover of her innocent childish dreams asleep there, she saw the poor boy who had gone hungry and barefoot, she saw the young man familiar in the strangeness of the future.  And, more than that, Lucina, who had hitherto shown fully to her awakening heart only her thought of Jerome, having never dared to look at him and love him at the same time, now gazed boldly at him asleep, and a sense of a great mystery came over her.  In Jerome she seemed to see herself also, the unity of the man and woman in love dawned upon her maiden imagination.  She felt as if Jerome’s hands were her hands, his breath hers.  “I never knew he looked like me before,” she thought with awe.

Then suddenly Jerome, with no stir of awaking, opened his eyes and looked at her.  Often, on arousing from a deep sleep, one has a sense of calm and wonderless observation as of a new birth.  Jerome looked for a moment at Lucina with no surprise.  In a new world all things may be, and impossibilities become commonplaces.