“She is praying,” she said.

Wayland had been extemporizing a morris chair into a lounge with his Service coat for a pillow.  He threw a navajo rug across.  Then, he faced her.  The look of masterdom had both hardened and softened.  She did not know that the hunger-light of her own face hardened that hardness; and she gazed through the darkened window to hide her tears.  He stood beside her with his arms folded.  A convulsive shudder shook her frame.  Wayland tightened his folded arms.  Sympathy is so easy.  The sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her love was pushing him not over the precipice but into the battle, out beyond the firing line.  What did one man matter in this big fight anyway?  They heard the sibilant hush of the River flood-tide; and the warm June dark enveloped them as in a caress.  They could see the sheet lightning glimmer on the bank of cumulous clouds behind the Holy Cross.  The humming night-hawk, up in the indigo of mid-heaven, uttered a lonely, far, fading call, as of life in flight; and a rustle of wind, faint as the brushing of moth wings, passed whispering into silence.

“You don’t really think death is the end of all, do you?” she asked.

Wayland could not answer.  If she had looked, she would have seen his face white and his eyes shining with a strange new light.  He drew back a little in the dark of the window casement, with his hand on the sill.  It touched hers and closed over it.  Then, somewhere from the dark came a night-sound heard only in June, the broken dream-trill of a bird in its sleep.  When she spoke, her voice was low, keyed as the dream-voice from the dark.

“Where did the spray of flowers you gave me come from?”

“Sprig I’d stuck in my hat band.”

“Was that all?  Didn’t you mean to tell me more?”

“It’s a pearl everlasting blossom,” answered Wayland.

She waited.  He heard the slow ticking of his own watch.

“I was dreaming of your face,” he blundered out, “and when I wakened, the thing had blown down on—­the hammock.”  It was a clumsy subterfuge; and he knew that her thought meeting his half-way divined his dream.

The wind passed whispering into silence.  He felt the quiver of the pine needles outside, trembling to the touch of wind and night.  The sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her love swept over him unstemmed; and, when she turned and looked in his eyes, he caught her in his arms and held her there with a fierce tenderness, her face thrown back, the veins of her throat pulsing to the touch of wind and night, her lips parted, her lashes hiding her eyes.

“Tell me that you are mine,” he whispered.

She did not answer for a moment.  Then she lifted her eyes.  He drank their light as a thirsty man might drink waters of life.  Neither spoke.  The rustling wind passed whispering.  The June dark enveloped them in the warm caress of the night.  By the dim flare of the library lamp he saw her lips trembling.