“I can’t believe that! Every one has it. I’m a thoroughly practical person, and yet I have my dreams,--my dream!”
Olive and Pollock were singing again. They were far in advance and their voices stole softly upon the night.
Zelda stopped to listen. Her heart was in a tumult of happiness and wonder. The splendor of the moonlight upon the fields about them, the gloomy shadow of the woodland beyond, the man beside her hesitating, yet ready to tell her of his love. There stole across her spirit the tremulous awe of a girl to whom love has come for the first time as it can never come again.
“No; you must not say it!” And there was a sob that caught her throat.
“You are the dream. It is too sweet; I can not lose it,--I must not.”
Olive and Pollock called to them ironically.
“Answer them, please,” she said, and Leighton spoke to them.
Zelda put her hand to her throat with a quick gesture, then dropped it.
“You have talked of dreams and love,” she said hurriedly, but with a lingering note of contempt on the last word that stung him as though she had struck him in the face.
“Dreams and love,” she repeated. “I wonder what love is!”
She laughed suddenly with a bitterness that he remembered for many a day.
“We’re coming,” she called, and hastened away toward her cousin and Pollock who waited, idling and trying their voices, and chaffing each other over their failure to carry a tune.
“We have gone far enough, Olive,” she said. “Let us go back now.”
They began retracing their steps, Zelda walking beside Pollock, to whom she talked with unusual vivacity. She did not speak to Leighton again until the two young men said good night at the veranda.
“What did you treat him that way for?” demanded Olive, facing Zelda in the hall as soon as the door closed.
“What are you talking about, _ma petite cousine_? The moon must have--”
“It wasn’t the moon! You said something unkind to Mr. Leighton. He walked back to the house with me without saying a word. You shouldn’t treat a man that way, even if you are my cousin,--a fine, splendid fellow like Morris Leighton!”
“You foolish, sentimental young thing, what on earth has got into you? Mr. Leighton talked to me about Wagner,--I think it was Wagner, and he didn’t interest me a bit. I’m going to bed.”