"Don't worry about how you ought to feel," she murmured. "Much better for us to quarrel than to make pretenses to each other. Besides a lot of that talk about doing things for people and earning their gratitude is false. A person has really no right to put another person under a debt of gratitude." "The truth is, I'm afraid of you," he grumbled. It was delicious to her to have him softened and faltering like this. "I'm afraid of you, too," she confessed. "How silly we both are!" For a moment or two they were wildly and unreasonably happy, standing there in the bland moonlight close together but not touching. His face was in the shadow but Pen could feel his eyes stabbing her out of the dark. Her own went down. They were like reeds shaken in the same gust. In that moment Pen knew that whatever bonds might be upon him out in the world, he was hers. Still he did not speak; he did not draw her to him. In the end she had to wrench herself away from the magnetic attraction of his body, or else she must have flung herself into his arms. "Let's walk," she said hurriedly. "We're safe enough in this out-of-the-way corner. You must need exercise. We'll circle round the field. Over in the corner there's a path leading down to an arm of Back creek where Dad keeps his boat in the winter." Don came down to earth with a sigh. He had a curious way, when his thoughts annoyed him, of shaking his head like a dog, to clear it. Without saying anything he tied the jute bag to an overhanging branch out of reach of four-footed prowlers, and came along with Pen. They kept to the fence line, silent for the most part. Their breasts were oppressed by moonlight, that high, pure medium which nevertheless stirs us so poignantly. The moon herself is all very well in her way, a lovely lamp in the dark, but one can stare at the moon all night without being transported. One must turn one's back on the moon to experience her magic. It is the strange light she casts on the face of our mother Earth, and Earth's smile under moonlight, soft, subtle and infinitely suggestive, that thrill us, that disquiet us, that unlock our spirits. On the one hand as they walked the field lay spread with a bloomy, gossamer coverlet of moonlight; on the other hand the swelling tree masses rose in rich velvety blackness under a lazulite sky.