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In some adroit way Mrs. Blakesly got her husband out of the room and left Ware and Miss Powell together. She was showing him the view from the windows, and they seemed to be perfectly absorbed. She looked around once and saw that Mrs. Blakesly was showing her husband something in the farther end of the room. After that she did not think of them.

The sun went lower in the sky and flamed along the sward. He spoke of the mystical power of the waving daisies and the glowing greens which no painter ever seems to paint. While they looked from the windows their arms touched, and they both tried to ignore it. She shivered a little as if a cold wind had blown upon her. At last she led the way out and down the stairs to the campus. They heard the gay laughter of the company at their cakes and ices, up at the central building.

He stopped outside the hallway, and as she looked up inquiringly at him, he said quietly: “Suppose we go down the road. It seems pleasanter there.”

She acquiesced like one in a pleasure which made duty seem absurd.

Strong and fine as she was, she had never found a lover to whom she yielded her companionship with unalloyed delight. She was thirty years of age, and her girlhood was past. She looked at this man, and a suffocating band seemed to encircle her throat. She knew he was strong and good. He was a little saddened with life–that she read in his deep-set eyes and unsmiling lips.

The road led toward the river, and as they left the campus they entered a lane shaded by natural oaks. He talked on slowly. He asked her what her plans were.

“To teach and to live,” she said. Her enthusiasm for the work seemed entirely gone.

Once he said, “This is the finest hour of my life.”

On the bank of the river they paused and seated themselves on the sward under a tree whose roots fingered the stream with knuckled hands.

“Yes, every time you look up at me you bring back my boyish idol,” he went on. “She was older than I. It is as if I had grown older and she had not, and that she were you, or you were she. I can’t tell you how it has affected me. Every movement you make goes deep down into my sweetest, tenderest recollections. It’s always June there, always sweet and sunny. Her death and burial were mystical in their beauty. I looked in her coffin. She was the grandest statue that ever lay in marble; the Greek types are insipid beside that vision. You’ll say I idealized her; possibly I did, but there she is. O God! it was terrible to see one die so young and so lovely.”

There was a silence. Tears came to her eyes. He could only exclaim; weeping was denied him. His voice trembled, but grew firmer as he went on:

“And now you come. I don’t know exactly in what way you resemble her. I only know you shake me as no other human being has done since that coffin-lid shut out her face.” He lifted his head and looked around. “But Nature is beautiful and full of light and buoyancy. I am not going to make you sad. I want to make you happy. I was only a boy to her. She cared for me only as a mature woman likes an apt pupil, but she made all Nature radiant for me, as you do now.”

He smiled upon her suddenly. His somber mood passed like one of the shadows of the clouds floating over the campus. It was only a recollected mood. As he looked at her the old hunger came into his heart, but the buoyancy and emotional exaltation of youth came back also.

“Miss Powell, are you free to marry me?” he said suddenly.