She linked an arm in Ellen's, and falling at once into her part of sober age, paced with her from the hall. Andrew, constrained in a way he hardly understood himself, was following them, but in their woman's community of silent understanding they took no notice of him. Outside, the night was soft and welcoming, unreal after the light and color, an enchanted wilderness of moonlight splendor. They had crossed the road to the bench under the old poplar, and there Ellen sat down and drew a breath of excitement and gladness to be free to think. The moonlight seemed still brighter, sifting down the sky-spaces, and the two women together looked up at it through the poplar branches and were exalted by that inexplicable sense of the certainty that things come true. Dreams--that was what their minds were seeking passionately--and dreams come true. "Ain't it wonderful?" Isabel asked softly. "Yes," said Ellen, in the same hushed tone, "it's wonderful." "I'll leave you here by yourself an' run acrost the orchard," said Isabel, in her other careless voice. "When I come back, I'll stop here an' we'll go in together. Why, Andrew, you here?" "You said you was afraid," he answered. "I'll go acrost with you." "All right," said Isabel, with her kindest laugh, not the teasing one that made him hate her while he thought how bright and dear she was. "Come take gran'ma acrost the orchard. Don't let anything happen to her." They stepped over the wall and made their way along the little path by the grape arbor. The fragrance of fruit was sweet, and the world seemed filled with it. "It's a pretty time o' year," said Andrew tremblingly. "Yes." "A kind of a time same 's this is to-night makes it seem as if life was pretty short. Be past before you know it." "Yes." She, too, spoke tremulously, and his heart went out to her. "O Isabel," he said, "when you're like this, same as you are to-night, there ain't a livin' creatur' that's as nice as you be." Isabel laughed. It was an echo of her flouting laugh, yet there was a little catch in the middle of it. "There!" he said, with discontentment. "Now you're just as you be half the time, an' I could shake you for it. Sometimes seems to me I could kill you." "Why don't you?" Isabel asked him, softly yet teasingly too, in a way that suddenly made her dearer. "If you don't see no use o' my livin', why don't you kill me?" "What you cryin' for?" Andrew besought her, in an agony of trouble. "O Isabel, what you cryin' for?" "I ain't cryin'," she said, "but if I am I guess it's for Ellen Bayliss, an' things--" She had never heard of "the tears of mortal things," and so she could not tell him. "Ellen Bayliss? What's the matter of Ellen Bayliss?" "Oh, she gets tired so quick, that's all." "Don't you get tired," said Andrew. "Don't you let anything happen to you. O Isabel!"