After they had eaten they were silent for a long time, and at last, rather to her surprise, she found herself beginning to explain to him that this was love, this the heaven at which she had been aiming, the full song whereof they had played the first few notes as boy and girl at the picnic and again in the dewy grass on the Heath. And she told him quite simply that she had loved him always, from the time when they had met on the stairs at the Detmold, and even before that, though she could not remember clearly. And she told him that love dwelt in the woods and the hedgerows, in the sweet air and the song of the birds, not only in the springtime but in the harsh winter weather and in the summer heat of the sun. . . . "Oh, Mendel," she said, "I have been wanting you to know, but it seemed that you would never know while you looked for love in the heat and the dust of London." And he as simply believed her. It was lovely there in the woods, among the tall grey-green pillars of the trees, with the pale yellow sunlight falling on the emerald of the moss and the russet of the dead bracken, and the brilliant enamel of the blackberry leaves. He was overcome with his exquisite delight, and she, to comfort him, held him in her arms, her weary shaggy faun, so bitterly conscious of his own ugliness. She soothed him and caressed him, and won him over to her own serene joy, which passed from her to him in wave upon wave of flooding warmth, melting the last coldness in his soul, healing the last wounds upon his spirit. He roused himself, flung up his head, and began to whistle:-- "Tit-a-weet!" And he looked so comical that she laughed. "That isn't anything like a bird," she said. "It is. It is very like cock robin." To their mutual amazement it seemed entirely unnecessary to discuss the future or the past, and the present demanded only happy silence. Here in the enchantment of the woods was love, and it was enough. While they stayed in the woods they hardly talked at all, but as they walked home he became solemn and said, as though it pained and puzzled him:-- "We are no longer young." "We shall never be anything else," she protested, for she was pained by the change in his mood. "Youth passes," he said. And her exhilaration died in her, for she knew she had touched his obstinacy. He saw her droop and was sorry, and began to whistle and to laugh, but she could not be revived. She had thought to have secured him, to have made him safe with the charm of love for ever, but she was sure now that the hardest of all was yet to come.