"Maybe grannie would pray for it, Osmond. Maybe I could sing it--I hope to sing now--maybe you could put it into the land and bring it out in flowers." "That's poetry!" said Osmond. He was smiling at her unconscious way of showing him how lovely she was and how loving. "I am going now, dear. I am going to take your present home carefully and look at it alone." She knitted wistful brows a moment. Then she too smiled. "You will see how valuable it is when you look at it," she said. "It will shine so." He had risen and stood before her, looking at her. "Rose," he said, "you're a darling." "Am I?" She was radiant. "I am going to think up the things lovers have said, and read Solomon's Song, maybe! But now I'm going back to the plantation, to let the Almighty God and the undergods have a chance to tell me how to give you up." "Ask them now, Osmond," she breathed. "Ask here, while I am here to answer, too." "No," said Osmond. He shook his head. "Not while we are together. I can't listen to Him." * * * * * In the road he met Peter. They stopped, and Peter said at once,-- "I've got three orders from New York. When they're finished, I'm going back to France." Osmond could not at once recall himself, even for his boy. Peter seemed only a figure of the night, familiarly dear, and yet unrelated to the great dream that swept across the sky with banners. Peter spoke again bluntly. "I shall paint again all right. You needn't worry. It's got hold of me." Then they shook hands. XXXI Osmond went back to his little house, not to sleep, but to think. The old habit of his life was changed. Henceforward, whether he took a woman's love or left it, things would not be the same. Say she loved him with the enduring passion of a woman at her best, could he let her undertake the half of his strange lot? Could he cut her off from a thousand sources of happiness to be found in the world she knew, even though he forced her to go out into that world and sing, and lessened his claim on her to a swallow flight now and then back to his waiting heart? If her lot were to be a public one, she would have, in a measure, to make it herself; for here was he, with his plants and trees, almost one of them, and he could not give up his hardy life, lest he dwindle and fail utterly. Besides, this was his business, as music was hers. Whatever communion they had, it could never be a unison of pursuits, but rather an interchange of rich devotion. It looked, he concluded, very bad for her.