The moon was now peeping, in little spots of light, through the higher foliage, casting a doubtful, ghostly shine around them. The night was warm. There was no wind except what the swift wing of a bat would now and then awake. The creature came and vanished like an undefined sense of evil at hand. But it was only Richard who thought that. Nothing so ominous crossed the starry clearness of Barbara’s soul. Her skirt made a soft noise as it glided past the heads of the rib-grass. Her red cloak was dark in the moonlight. She threw back the hood, and coming out of its shadow like another moon from a cloud, walked the earth with bare head. Her hands too were bare, and glimmering in the night gleam. Higher and higher rose the moon. The moon was everywhere, filling everything as they walked. Far away they saw the house, remote, scarcely existent in the dreaming night. It was much too far away to give them an anxious thought, and for long it seemed, like death, to be coming no nearer. But they were moving toward it all the time, and it was growing a more insistent fact. Thus they walked at once in the two-blended worlds of moonlight and the tale, while Richard half-chanted the music-speech of the most musical of poets, telling of the roaring wind that the mariner did not feel, of the dances of the stars, of the sighing of the sails.

When Richard came to the words—

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small,

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all,—

she clapped her hands together, and when he ended, she cried out—

“I was sure of it! I knew something would come to tie it all up together into one bundle! That’s it! That’s it! The love of everything is the garden-bed out of which grow the roses of prayer!—

“But what am I saying!” she added, checking herself. “I love everything, at least everything that comes near me, and I never pray!”

“Of course not! Why should you?” said Richard.

“Why should I not?”

“You would if it were reasonable!”

“I will, then! To love all the creatures and not have a word to say to the God that made them for loving—is that reasonable?”

“No, if a God did make them.”

“They could not make themselves!”

“No, nothing could make itself.”

“Then somebody must have made them!”

“Who?”

“Why, the one that could and did—who else?”

“We know nothing about such a somebody. All we know is, that there they are, and we have got to love them!”