How long did she sit there in the darkness? That was something she never knew and her father was like her about it too. Later he couldn’t have said, for the life of him, how long he ran about in the darkness, trying to strike something with the axe. Once he ran against a tree. Well, he drew back and sank the axe into the tree. Sometime—in the daytime—May would show Maud the tree with the great gash in it. Her father sank the axe so deeply into the body of the tree that he had work getting it out again and even in the midst of his excitement he had to laugh to think of what a silly fool he had been. And there was May sitting with her feet in the puddle, the hair clinging to her bare shoulders, her head in her hands, trying to think, trying perhaps to catch some meaningful word in the strange roar of voices. Well, what was she thinking about? She didn’t know. And then a hand touched her, a white strong firm hand. It just crept up out of the darkness, seemed to come out of the very ground under her. There was one thing sure—although she lived to be a thousand years old, May would never know why she didn’t scream, faint away, get up and run madly, butting her head against things. “Love is a strange thing,” she told Maud Welliver, as the two sat in the field that warm clear starlit evening. Her voice trembled. “I knew a man had come to whom I would be faithful unto death,” she explained. That was the beginning of the strangest and most exciting time in May’s whole life. Never had she thought she would tell anyone in the world about it, at least not until the time came for her marriage, and when all the dangers that still faced the man she loved had passed like a cloud. On that terrible night, and while the storm still raged, the hand that had crept so strangely and unexpectedly into hers had at once quieted and reassured her. It was too dark to see the face and the body of the man’s back of the hand, but for some reason she knew at once that he was beautiful and good. She loved the man at once and completely, that was the truth. Later he had told her that his own experience was the same. For him also there came a great peace of the spirit, after his hand found hers in the midst of that roaring darkness.