The Heart

As we followed on that moonlight night, she and I alone, of a sudden

I felt my youth and love arise to such an assailing of the joy of

life, that I knew myself dragged as it were by it, and had no more

choosing as to what I should not do. Verily it would be easier to

lead an army of malcontents than one's own self. And something there

was about the moonlight on that fair Virginian night, and the

heaviness of the honey-scents, and the pressure of love and life on

every side, in bush and vine and tree and nest, which seemed to

overbear me and sweep me along as on the crest of some green tide of

spring. Verily there are forces of this world which are beyond the

overcoming of mortal man so long as he is encumbered by his

mortality.

Mary Cavendish gathered up her blue and silver petticoats about her

as closely as a blue flower-bell at nightfall, and stepped along

daintily at my side, and the feel of her little hand on my arm

seemed verily the only touch of material things which held me to

this world. We came to a great pool of wet in our way, and suddenly

I thought of her feet in her little satin shoes. "Madam, you will

wet your feet if you walk through that pool in your satin shoes," I

said, and my voice was so hoarse with tenderness that I would not

have known it for my own, and I felt her arm tremble. "No," she said

faintly. But without waiting for any permission, around her waist I

put an arm, and had her raised in a twinkling from the ground, and

bore her across the pool, she not struggling, but only whispering

faintly when I set her down after it was well passed. "You--you

should not have done that, Harry."

Then of a sudden, close she pressed her soft cheek against my

shoulder as we walked, and whispered, as though she could keep

silent no longer, and yet as if she swooned for shame in breaking

silence: "Harry, Harry, I liked the way you thrust them aside when

they were rude with you, to do me a service, and Harry, you are

stronger, and--and--than them all."

Then I knew with such a shock of joy, that I wonder I lived, that

the child loved me, but I knew at the same time as never I had known

it before, my love for her.

"Mistress Mary," I said, "I but did my duty and my service, which

you can always count upon, and I did no more than others would have

done. Sir Humphrey Hyde--"