“Listen!” she repeated, making a great effort to calm herself, to regain something of that frame of mind in which their love had assumed the proportions of folly and madness, to summon up the scruples which, before she had left home that morning, she had resolved to lay before him, which she knew would return when she could be alone again.  “I have to think —­you won’t,” she exclaimed, with a fleeting smile.

“Well, what is it?” he assented.  “You might as well get it off now.”

And it took all her strength to say:  “I don’t see how I can marry you.  I’ve told you the reasons.  You’re rich, and you have friends who wouldn’t understand—­and your children—­they wouldn’t understand.  I—­I’m nothing, I know it isn’t right, I know you wouldn’t be happy.  I’ve never lived—­in the kind of house you live in and known the kind of people you know, I shouldn’t know what to do.”

He took his eyes off the road and glanced down at her curiously.  His smile was self-confident, exultant.

“Now do you feel better—­you little Puritan?” he said.

And perforce she smiled in return, a pucker appearing between her eyebrows.

“I mean it,” she said.  “I came out to tell you so.  I know—­it just isn’t possible.”

“I’d marry you to-day if I could get a license,” he declared.  “Why, you’re worth any woman in America, I don’t care who she is, or how much money she has.”

In spite of herself she was absurdly pleased.

“Now that is over, we won’t discuss it again, do you understand?  I’ve got you,” he said, “and I mean to hold on to you.”

She sighed.  He was driving slowly now along the sandy road, and with his hand on hers she simply could not think.  The spell of his nearness, of his touch, which all nature that morning conspired to deepen, was too powerful to be broken, and something was calling to her, “Take this day, take this day,” drowning out the other voice demanding an accounting.  She was living—­what did it all matter?  She yielded herself to the witchery of the hour, the sheer delight of forthfaring into the unknown.

They turned away from the river, crossing the hills of a rolling country now open, now wooded, passing white farmhouses and red barns, and ancient, weather-beaten dwellings with hipped roofs and “lean-tos” which had been there in colonial days when the road was a bridle-path.  Cows and horses stood gazing at them from warm paddocks, where the rich, black mud glistened, melted by the sun; chickens scratched and clucked in the barnyards or flew frantically across the road, sometimes within an ace of destruction.  Janet flinched, but Ditmar would laugh, gleefully, boyishly.

“We nearly got that one!” he would exclaim.  And then he had to assure her that he wouldn’t run over them.

“I haven’t run over one yet,—­have I?” he would demand.

“No, but you will, it’s only luck.”