"I almost think I hear one. You see if you don't."
She caught the pace then, and listened. Presently she spoke as gravely as he had done.
"I am sure I hear one--over there in the rose garden."
"I knew you would." He breathed quickly, in a gay relief. "Yes, in the rose garden, 'her breast against a thorn.' Well, playmate, it's a wonderful night. I smell the roses, too, don't you?"
"Yes, and lilies. The nightingale sings very loud."
"Let us talk, playmate. Where have you been since I saw you last?"
"Since that other night I came down here?"
"Since that other year, so long ago. We mustn't forget there are other years, though we can't quite recall them. If there hadn't been, we shouldn't be hearing the nightingale to-night and talking without words. You see it's a good while since I saw you. How old are you?"
"Twenty-five! A quarter of a century. That's a long time. Well, what have you been doing all that twenty-five years?"
She seemed to shrink into herself, as if a hand had struck her.
"Don't!" she breathed. "Don't ask me to remember."
"Troubles me! it kills me. Can't we begin now?"
"We will begin now. There, playmate, don't shiver. I feel you're doing it through the moonlight. Don't let your chin tremble either. It did, that night down in the shack."
"I guess so. Anyway it trembled a lot, and I made up my mind it mustn't any more. Cheer up, playmate. Be a man."
"I wish I were a man." She spoke bitterly. The beauty of the night seemed to break about her, and this castle of whim that had looked, a moment ago, more solid than certainty, was crumbling.
"Now you're doing what I told you not to," he warned her gravely. "You have stopped telling the truth. You don't wish you were a man. Think how happy you were a minute ago, only because you are a beautiful woman and you heard the nightingale."
She was struggling back into the clear medium that had been between them the moment before.
"I only meant"--she spoke painstakingly, hunting for words and pathetically anxious to have them right--"I only meant--I have been unhappy. No man would have been as unhappy as I have been."
Osmond smiled a little to himself, in grave communing. The uphill road of his life presented itself to him as a thorny way so hard that, if he had foreseen it from the beginning, he would have said it was impossible. But at the same instant he remembered where it had led him: he had come out into clear air, he was resting in this garden of delight. And she, too, was resting. He knew that with a perfect certainty.