tly. "There is
nothing alive this moment, nothing in the great sun's light, that has
put on such a glory of maturity. Why, you are concentrated sunlight--to
me!"

"That's very pretty," she said, and turned a glance into his eyes....
The same cool deeps were there, though his face held a singular
happiness. She wondered if it were because she had not forbade him to
speak. Did he think she was ready, and that her heart was free?

There was no one on the sloping hill-road, either to the right or left,
and only the colts in the meadows. A good free thing--this elimination
of human beings--though at this height, they stood in the very eye of
the country-side. The chestnut mare was cropping the young grass by the
edge of the highway, but there were matters for Clarendon to
understand--far distances and movements not for human eyes. The colts
racing up and down the hill-fence were beneath his notice. The great
arched neck was lifted for far gazing and listening, and that which
came to his foreign senses, caused him to snort softly from time to
time....

Beth rode without hat. Her arms were bare to the elbows; her gray silk
waist open at the throat. She stretched out her arms, and the sunlight,
cut by the high elm boughs, fell upon her like a robe, woven of
shimmerings. She seemed to want her full portion of vitality from the
great upbuilding day.

"It's strong medicine--this high noon of June," she said. "One feels
like unfolding as flowers do."

And then came over him--over all his senses--something flower-like in
scent, yet having to do with no particular flower. It dilated his
nostrils, but more than that, all his senses awoke to the strange charm
of it.... The distance between them was gone that instant. Though it
may have endured for ages and ages, it was gone. He had overtaken
her.... A haunting influence; and yet of magic authority! Was it the
perfume of the lotos and the bees? It was more than that. It was the
sublimate of all his bewitchings--chaste mountains, dawns, the morning
glow upon great heights, the flock of flying swans red with daybreak;
more still, all the petals of the Adelaide passion restored in one drop
of fragrance, and lifted, a different fragrance, the essence of a
miracle! This was the perfume that came from her life, from her arms
and throat and red mouth....

It was new out of the years. All his strangely guarded strength arose
suddenly animate. A forgotten self had come back to him, all f