was very trite, but it was a song. Celestial modesty and pride were
in it, and joy which looked at itself and doubted if it were joy.

Then came the man's voice, and that sang a song also foolish and
trite, but divine and triumphant and new as every spring.

Henry and Meeks saw gradually, as they listened, afraid to move lest
they be heard. They saw Horace and Rose sitting on the green turf
under an apple-tree. They leaned against its trunk, twisted with
years of sun and storm, and the green spread of branches was
overhead, and they were all dappled with shade and light like the
gold bosses of a shield. The man's arm was around the girl, and they
were looking at each other and seeing this world and that which is to
come.

Suddenly Meeks gave Henry's arm another violent clutch. He pointed.
Then they saw another girl standing in the tangle of wild grapes. She
wore a green muslin gown, and was so motionless that it was not easy
to discern her readily. She was listening and watching the lovers,
and her young face was terrible. It was full of an enormous, greedy
delight, as of one who eats ravenously, and yet there was malignity
and awful misery and unreason in it. Her cheeks were flushed and her
blue eyes glittered. It was evident that everything she heard and saw
caused her the most horrible agony and a more horrible joy. She was
like a fanatic who dances in fire.

Meeks and Henry looked at her for a long minute, then at each other.
Henry nodded as if in response to a question. Then the two men,
moving by almost imperceptible degrees, keeping the utmost silence,
hearing all the time that love duet on the other side of the
grape-vines, got behind the girl. She had been so intent that there
had been no danger of seeing them. Horace and Rose were also so
intent that they were not easily reached by any sight or sound
outside themselves.

Meeks noiselessly and firmly clasped one of Lucy Ayres's arms. It was
very slender, and pathetically cold through her thin sleeve. Henry
grasped the other. She turned her wild young face over her shoulder,
and saw them, and yielded. Between them the two men half carried,
half led the girl away across the fields to the road. When they were
on the road Henry released his grasp of her arm, but Meeks retained
his. "Will you go quietly home?" said he, "or shall Mr. Whitman and I
go with you?"

"I will go," Lucy replied, in a hoarse whisper.

Meeks looked keenly at her. "Now, Lucy," he sai