rdly knowing which bliss was
greatest--kissing her delicate mouth or gazing into her face--she all at
once put her arms about my neck and drew herself up until she sat on my
knee.

"Abel--shall I call you Abel now--and always?" she spoke, still with
her arms round my neck. "Ah, why did you let me come to Riolama? I would
come! I made him come--old grandfather, sleeping there: he does not
count, but you--you! After you had heard my story, and knew that it was
all for nothing! And all I wished to know was there--in you. Oh, how
sweet it is! But a little while ago, what pain! When I stood on the
mountain when you talked to me, and I knew that you knew best, and tried
and tried not to know. At last I could try no more; they were all dead
like mother; I had chased the false water on the savannah. 'Oh, let me
die too,' I said, for I could not bear the pain. And afterwards, here in
the cave, I was like one asleep, and when I woke I did not really wake.
It was like morning with the light teasing me to open my eyes and look
at it. Not yet, dear light; a little while longer, it is so sweet to lie
still. But it would not leave me, and stayed teasing me still, like a
small shining green fly; until, because it teased me so, I opened my
lids just a little. It was not morning, but the firelight, and I was in
your arms, not in my little bed. Your eyes looking, looking into mine.
But I could see yours better. I remembered everything then, how you once
asked me to look into your eyes. I remembered so many things--oh, so
many!"

"How many things did you remember, Rima?"

"Listen, Abel, do you ever lie on the dry moss and look straight up into
a tree and count a thousand leaves?"

"No, sweetest, that could not be done, it is so many to count. Do you
know how many a thousand are?"

"Oh, do I not! When a humming-bird flies close to my face and stops
still in the air, humming like a bee, and then is gone, in that short
time I can count a hundred small round bright feathers on its throat.
That is only a hundred; a thousand are more, ten times. Looking up I
count a thousand leaves; then stop counting, because there are thousands
more behind the first, and thousands more, crowded together so that I
cannot count them. Lying in your arms, looking up into your face, it was
like that; I could not count the things I remembered. In the wood, when
you were there, and before; and long, long ago at Voa, when I was a
child with mother."

"Tell me