She hurried softly down the cart-path between the trees, then suddenly stood still, for under a great pine-tree on the right lay Jerome. His hat was off, one arm was thrown over his head, his face was flushed with heat and slumber. Lucina, her body bent aloof with an indescribable poise of delicacy and the impulse of flight, yet looked at her sleeping lover until her whole heart seemed to feed itself through her eyes. Lucina had not seen him for more than six weeks, except by sly glimpses at meeting and on the road. She thought, pitifully, that he had grown thin; she noticed what a sad droop his mouth had at the corners. She pitied, loved, and feared him, with all the trifold power of her feminine heart. As she looked at him, her remembrance of old days so deepened and intensified that they seemed to close upon the present and the future. Love, even when it has apparently no past, is at once a memory and a revelation. Lucina saw the little lover of her innocent childish dreams asleep there, she saw the poor boy who had gone hungry and barefoot, she saw the young man familiar in the strangeness of the future. And, more than that, Lucina, who had hitherto shown fully to her awakening heart only her thought of Jerome, having never dared to look at him and love him at the same time, now gazed boldly at him asleep, and a sense of a great mystery came over her. In Jerome she seemed to see herself also, the unity of the man and woman in love dawned upon her maiden imagination. She felt as if Jerome's hands were her hands, his breath hers. "I never knew he looked like me before," she thought with awe. Then suddenly Jerome, with no stir of awaking, opened his eyes and looked at her. Often, on arousing from a deep sleep, one has a sense of calm and wonderless observation as of a new birth. Jerome looked for a moment at Lucina with no surprise. In a new world all things may be, and impossibilities become commonplaces. Then he sprang up, and went close to her. "Is it you?" he said, in a sobbing voice. Lucina looked at him piteously. She wanted to run away, but her limbs trembled, her little hands twitched in the folds of her muslin skirt. Jerome saw her trembling, and a soft pink suffusing her fair face, even her sweet throat and her arms, under her thin sleeves. He knew, with a sudden leap of tenderness, which would have its way in spite of himself, why she was there. She had wanted to see him so, the dear child, the fair, wonderful lady, that she had come through the heat of this burning afternoon, stealing away alone from all her friends, and even from her own decorous self, for his sake. He pointed to the clear space under the pine where he had been lying. "Shall we sit down there--a minute?" he stammered. "I--think I--had better go," said Lucina, faintly, with the quick impulse of maidenhood to flee from that which it has sought. "Only a few minutes--I have something to tell you."