wonder you slept through the discussion. Listen! There they go now. Is
that applause? Or is it a riot?"

Arose a thin twittering, like elfin pipings, with sharp pitches and
excited shrillnesses, to which Dick and Paula lent delighted ears,
till, suddenly, with the abruptness of the trump of doom, all the
microphonic chorus of the tiny golden lovers was swept away,
obliterated, in a Gargantuan blast of sound--no less wild, no less
musical, no less passionate with love, but immense, dominant,
compelling by very vastitude of volume.

The eager eyes of the man and woman sought instantly the channel past
open French windows and the screen of the sleeping porch to the road
through the lilacs, while they waited breathlessly for the great
stallion to appear who trumpeted his love-call before him. Again,
unseen, he trumpeted, and Dick said:

"I will sing you a song, my haughty moon. It is not my song. It is the
Mountain Lad's. It is what he nickers. Listen! He sings it again. This
is what he says: 'Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill
the wide valleys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures;
for they know me. The grass grows rich and richer, the land is filled
with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The
spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring. The mares
remember my voice. They know me aforetime through their mothers before
them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and the wide valleys
are my heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.'"

And Paula pressed closer to her husband, and was pressed, as her lips
touched his forehead, and as the pair of them, gazing at the empty