“We must go in,” said Nancy, at length.

I followed her across the field and through the orchard.  From the porch we stood gazing out at the whitening rain that blotted all save the nearer landscape, and the smell of wet, midsummer grasses will always be associated with the poignancy of that moment....  At dinner, between the intervals of silence, our talk was of trivial things.  We made a mere pretence of eating, and I remember having my attention arrested by the sight of a strange, pitying expression on the face of Mrs. Olsen, who waited on us.  Before that the woman had been to me a mere ministering automaton.  But she must have had ideas and opinions, this transported Swedish peasant....  Presently, having cleared the table, she retired....  The twilight deepened to dusk, to darkness.  The storm, having spent the intensity of its passion in those first moments of heavy downpour and wind, had relaxed to a gentle rain that pattered on the roof, and from the stream came recurringly the dirge of the frogs.  All I could see of Nancy was the dim outline of her head and shoulders:  she seemed fantastically to be escaping me, to be fading, to be going; in sudden desperation I dropped on my knees beside her, and I felt her hands straying with a light yet agonized touch, over my head.

“Do you think I haven’t suffered, too? that I don’t suffer?” I heard her ask.

Some betraying note for which I had hitherto waited in vain must have pierced to my consciousness, yet the quiver of joy and the swift, convulsive movement that followed it seemed one.  Her strong, lithe body was straining in my arms, her lips returning my kisses....  Clinging to her hands, I strove to summon my faculties of realization; and I began to speak in broken, endearing sentences.

“It’s stronger than we are—­stronger than anything else in the world,” she said.

“But you’re not sorry?” I asked.

“I don’t want to think—­I don’t care,” she replied.  “I only know that I love you.  I wonder if you will ever know how much!”

The moments lengthened into hours, and she gently reminded me that it was late.  The lights in the little farmhouses near by had long been extinguished.  I pleaded to linger; I wanted her, more of her, all of her with a fierce desire that drowned rational thought, and I feared that something might still come between us, and cheat me of her.

“No, no,” she cried, with fear in her voice.  “We shall have to think it out very carefully—­what we must do.  We can’t afford to make any mistakes.”

“We’ll talk it all over to-morrow,” I said.

With a last, reluctant embrace I finally left her, walked blindly to where the motor car was standing, and started the engine.  I looked back.  Outlined in the light of the doorway I saw her figure in what seemed an attitude of supplication....