up before day to look across again--longing, longing all the time.
Of course one must supply all this from one's own imagination or
experience.

But Adorine could sing, and she sang. One might hear, in a favorable
wind, a gunshot, or the barking of a dog from one place to the other,
so that singing, as to effect, was nothing more than the voicing of
her looking and thinking and longing.

When one loves, it is as if everything was known of and seen by the
other; not only all that passes in the head and heart, which would
in all conscience be more than enough to occupy the other, but the
talking, the dressing, the conduct. It was then that the back hair was
braided and the front curled more and more beautifully every day, and
that the calico dresses became stiffer and stiffer, and the white
crochet lace collar broader and lower in the neck. At thirteen she was
beautiful enough to startle one, they say, but that was nothing; she
spent time and care upon these things, as if, like other women, her
fate seriously depended upon them. There is no self-abnegation like
that of a woman in love.

It was her singing, however, which most showed that other existence
in her existence. When she sang at her spinning-wheel or her loom, or
knelt battling clothes on the bank of the bayou, her lips would kiss
out the words, and the tune would rise and fall and tremble, as if
Zepherin were just across there, anywhere; in fact, as if every blue
and white lily might hide an ear of him.

It was the time of the new moon, fortunately, when all sit up late in
the country. The family would stop in their talking about the
wedding to listen to her. She did not know it herself, but it--the
singing--was getting louder and clearer, and, poor little thing, it
told everything. And after the family went to bed they could still
hear her, sitting on the bank of the bayou, or up in her window,
singing and looking at the moon traveling across the lily prairie--for
all its beauty and brightness no more beautiful and bright than a
heart in love.

It was just past the middle of the week, a Thursday night. The moon
was so bright the colors of the lilies could be seen, and the singing,
so sweet, so far-reaching--it was the essence of the longing of love.
Then it was that the miracle happened to her. Miracles are always
happening to the Acadians. She could not sleep, she could not stay in
bed. Her heart drove her to the window, and kept her there, and--among
t