an can never tame
or garden out of the land: the strength of unconquerable fertility--the
remote deep life in Nature's heart. Men and women had their spans of
existence; those trees seemed as if there forever! From generation to
generation lovers might come and, looking on this strength and beauty,
feel in their veins the sap of the world. Here the laborer and his
master, hearing the wind in the branches and the water murmuring down,
might for a brief minute grasp the land's unchangeable wild majesty.
And on the far side of that little stream was a field of moon-colored
flowers that had for Nedda a strange fascination. Once the boy jumped
across and brought her back a handkerchief full. They were of two kinds:
close to the water's edge the marsh orchis, and farther back, a small
marguerite. Out of this they made a crown of the alternate flowers, and
a girdle for her waist. That was an evening of rare beauty, and warm
enough already for an early chafer to go blooming in the dusk. An
evening when they wandered with their arms round each other a long time,
silent, stopping to listen to an owl; stopping to point out each star
coming so shyly up in the gray-violet of the sky. And that was the
evening when they had a strange little quarrel, sudden as a white squall
on a blue sea, or the tiff of two birds shooting up in a swift spiral of
attack and then--all over. Would he come to-morrow to see her milking?
He could not. Why? He could not; he would be out. Ah! he never told her
where he went; he never let her come with him among the laborers like
Sheila.

"I can't; I'm pledged not."

"Then you don't trust me!"

"Of course I trust you; but a promise is a promise. You oughtn't to ask
me, Nedda."

"No; but I would never have promised to keep anything from you."

"You don't understand."

"Oh! yes, I do. Love doesn't mean the same to you that it does to me."

"How do you know what it means to me?"

"I couldn't have a secret from you."

"Then you don't count honour."

"Honour only binds oneself!"

"What d'you mean by that?"

"I include you--you don't include me in yourself, that's all."

"I think you're very unjust. I was obliged to promise; it doesn't only
concern myself."

Then silent, motionless, a yard apart, they looked fiercely at each
other, their hearts stiff and sore, and in their brains no glimmer of
perception of anything but tragedy. What more tragic than to have
come out of an elysium of warm arms rou