In the silvery sheen with which the moon joyously and approvingly bathed them their eyes, wide, dark, luminous, clung for an aeon of time, reckoned in the history of love. Then David, knowing that his unasked question had been gloriously answered, bent his head until his lips touched hers. He must have felt the slight stiffening of her body, the ardor in her small hands as they clung more fiercely to his shoulders. For he flung up his head, then turned it sharply away for a moment, as if ashamed for her to see the passion in his eyes. She took a drunken, uncertain step away from him, and his arms fell laxly from her body. “What is it, David?” she asked in a small, quavering voice, scarcely more than a whisper. “I shouldn’t have done that!” David reproached himself with boyish bitterness. “But David,” Sally pleaded, in that small quaver, “don’t you—don’t you love me—at all? I thought—I—” Her hands fluttered toward him, then dropped hopelessly as he still stood sharply turned away from her. “Yes, I love you. That’s the devil of it,” David groaned from the shelter of his arm. “I love you so much I can’t think of anything else, not even of our danger.” She crept closer to him, stroked timidly the clenched fist which hung at his side. “Then—why, David? I—I love you, too. You—must—have known. I love you with all my heart.” She stooped swiftly and laid her lips against his knuckles, which shone white as marble in the moonlight. “Don’t!” he cried sharply. He lowered the arm that had sheltered his shamed, passionate eyes and looked at her humbly, his whole body drooping. “Don’t you see, darling—no, I mustn’t call you that!—don’t you see, Sally, that your—caring—only makes it worse? I wish I were the only one that has to suffer. But you’re so young—oh, God!” he cried in sudden anguish. “You’re so pitifully young! Sixteen! I ought to be horsewhipped!” She laughed shakily. “I’m getting older every day, David. Is it such a crime to be young? You’re young, too, David—darling!” The word was dropped shyly, on a tremulous whisper. “That’s it!” David cried wildly, fiercely under his breath. “We’re both young! I’m just half through college, and I haven’t a cent to my name except what I earned those two weeks on Carson’s farm. And I won’t have any money except barely enough to live on—I work my way through college—until I’ve finished school. And then it will be a long, hard struggle to get a start, unless my grandfather dies by then and leaves me his farm. He’s a miserly old man, darling. He thinks I’m a fool to study scientific farming, won’t give me a cent. I haven’t wanted it—till now.” “And now, David?” she prompted softly, her fingers closing caressingly about the clenched hand which she must not kiss.