entered
a rutty cart-path, and was in the Edwards' woodland.

For the first time in her life, Lucina Merritt was doing something
which she acknowledged to herself to be distinctly unmaidenly. She
had come to this wood because she had heard Jerome say that he often
strolled here of a Sunday afternoon. Her previous little schemes for
meeting him had been innocent to her own understanding, but now she
had tasted the fruit of knowledge of her own heart.

She felt fairly sick with shame at what she was doing, she blushed to
her own thoughts, but she had a helpless impulse as before, some
goading spur in her own nature which she could not withstand.

She hurried softly down the cart-path between the trees, then
suddenly stood still, for under a great pine-tree on the right lay
Jerome. His hat was off, one arm was thrown over his head, his face
was flushed with heat and slumber. Lucina, her body bent aloof with
an indescribable poise of delicacy and the impulse of flight, yet
looked at her sleeping lover until her whole heart seemed to feed
itself through her eyes.

Lucina had not seen him for more than six weeks, except by sly
glimpses at meeting and on the road. She thought, pitifully, that he
had grown thin; she noticed what a sad droop his mouth had at the
corners. She pitied, loved, and feared him, with all the trifold
power of her feminine heart.

As she looked at him, her remembrance of old days so deepened and
intensified that they seemed to close upon the present and the
future. Love, even when it has apparently no past, is at once a
memory and a revelation. Lucina saw the little lover of her innocent
childish dreams asleep there, she saw the poor boy who had gone
hungry and barefoot, she saw the young man familiar in the
strangeness of the future. And, more than that, Lucina, who had
hitherto shown fully to her awakening heart only her thought of
Jerome, having never dared to look at him and love him at the same
time, now gazed boldly at him asleep, and a sense of a great mystery
came over her. In Jerome she seemed to see herself also, the unity of
the man and woman in love dawned upon her maiden imagination. She
felt as if Jerome's hands were her hands, his breath hers. "I never
knew he looked like me before," she thought with awe.

Then suddenly Jerome, with no stir of awaking, opened his eyes and
looked at her. Often, on arousing from a deep sleep, one has a sense
of calm and wonderless observation as of a