“Waldo,” she said, peering into a large cart, “is that you? I am so dazed with the tallow candles, I see nothing.”

He had made himself a place between the two seats. She climbed up and sat on the sloping floor in front.

“I thought I should find you here,” she said, drawing her skirt up about her shoulders. “You must take me home presently, but not now.”

She leaned her head on the seat near to his, and they listened in silence to the fitful twanging of the fiddles as the night-wind bore it from the farm-house, and to the ceaseless thud of the dancers, and the peals of gross laughter. She stretched out her little hand to feel for his.

“It is so nice to lie here and hear that noise,” she said. “I like to feel that strange life beating up against me. I like to realize forms of life utterly unlike mine.” She drew a long breath. “When my own life feels small, and I am oppressed with it, I like to crush together, and see it in a picture, in an instant, a multitude of disconnected unlike phases of human life — a mediæval monk with his string of beads pacing the quiet orchard, and looking up from the grass at his feet to the heavy fruit-trees; little Malay boys playing naked on a shining sea-beach; a Hindoo philosopher alone under his banyan-tree, thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the thought of God he may lose himself; a troop of Bacchanalians dressed in white, with crowns of vine-leaves, dancing along the Roman streets; a martyr on the night of his death looking through the narrow window to the sky, and feeling that already he has the wings that shall bear him up” (she moved her hand dreamily over her face); “an epicurean discoursing at a Roman bath to a knot of his disciples on the nature of happiness; a Kaffir witch-doctor seeking for herbs by moonlight, while from the huts on the hill-side come the sound of dogs barking, and the voices of women and children; a mother giving bread and milk to her children in little wooden basins and singing the evening song. I like to see it all; I feel it run through me — that life belongs to me; it makes my little life larger, it breaks down the narrow walls that shut me in.”

She sighed, and drew a long breath.

“Have you made any plan?” she asked him presently.

“Yes,” he said, the words coming in jets, with pauses between; “I will take the gray mare — I will travel first — I will see the world — then I will find work.”

“What work?”

“I do not know.”

She made a little impatient movement.