"What?" she said, her tone firmer, her pace abating.
"I cannot wait," he said; "you can’t go in till—after."
She cast a swift glance upwards—but his eyes were forward bent. He pressed swiftly on. She walked beside him.
Suddenly he paused, then stood still. He listened intently; no sound but the desultory barking of a distant watch-dog. He looked about—and the voiceless night seemed to contain no other but those twain. He could see the blinking light in the window, the one Madeline had pointed to; it made the solitude deeper, like a far-off gleam at sea.
"Let us go in here and sit down," he said, pointing towards a little clearance under the shadow of two spreading oaks that towered above an intervening thicket.
They stepped down from the rickety sidewalk. And they crossed the dusty road, neither speaking; and the dew glistened on their feet as they went on into the thickening grass—and Madeline could hear her poor heart beating, but she uttered never a word.
It is the glory of a strong woman that she sometimes may be weak; nay, that she must be, by very token of her strength. For her strength hath its home in love and in her capacity to love—there is her crown and there the well-spring of her beauty and her charm. Yet this knows its highest strength in weakness; and its victory is in surrender. And the greatest moment in the life of the noblest woman is when convention and propriety and custom—and the tyranny of the social code—yea, when even her own native pride, her womanly reticence, her insistence on all that a woman may demand, are defiantly renounced; when these all lie in ruins at her feet, scorned and forgotten by reason of the torrent of her love; when beauty’s tresses lie dishevelled, and its robes of dignity are stained with tears, then is woman’s wild eternal heart at its very noblest in all the abandon of the passion that sets it free from every tie save one.
Wherefore Madeline—she of the beauteous face and of the snow-white heart—went on with Harvey where he led. Down from the pavement she stepped, down into the earthly road, reckless of the dainty fabric that the dust leaped to stain; and she walked on into the glistening grass, and her eyes saw the waiting oak and the vast sky behind. And the night was dark, and even the distant blinking light was hidden; and she could hear the soft language of the mother bird that kept her love-taught vigil, and the whippoorwill’s cry came in mellow waves across the rippling woods—and the great tender arms of the holy night were about them all.