hall, and high, high up in yonder beech, where the squirrel was sitting,
should be their secret little bed-chamber, hung in blue and green, with
a ceiling of stars. They should climb it each night on a ladder of
moonlight, and slide down from it each morning on the first strong rays
of the sun. And sometimes if it frightened them with being too near
heaven, they would seek out a dell of fine moss and creep close together
into the arms of the kind earth-mother, and then sleep while the stars
kept watch.

O, yes, it would be a wonderful life together.

Then suddenly the child's play would cease, as the birds stop singing
with the coming of the stars, and silence would sweep over them again,
and a great kiss would leap out of the silence, like a flame that lights
up heaven from north to south, and they would hang together, lost in an
anguish of desire.

The setting sun was turning the wood into halls of strange light, and
spreading golden couches here and there in its deep recesses.

"Theophil..." sighed Isabel.

"Wife..." sighed Theophil--(ah! Jenny!) and then a voice that seemed to
be neither's, and yet seemed to be the voice of both,--a voice like a
dove smothered in sweetness between their breasts,--said, "Let us go
deeper into the wood."

Later, when the stars had come, two white faces came glimmering from the
innermost chancel of the wood's green darkness. They passed close
together, still as phantoms among the trees, and when they came out on