We came to a cross-road. She touched me on the arm; we swerved into it. Far down the white stretch I saw a speck, which resolved itself into a man and woman, traveling away from us with their backs towards us. The man wore the blue blouse and wide, baggy trousers of a peasant; his feet were shod in sabots. The woman was clad in a coarse, loose dress, like a sack drawn over her and tied about the middle; it was neutral in tone, being aged by weather. Her figure was shapeless--almost animal in its ponderous patience and breadth. Her hair was flaxen from exposure. They plodded through the bleak expanse with heads bowed, bodies huddled, and arms encircling. Every few paces they halted; we saw the gleam of their faces as they clung lip to lip in hasty ecstasy. The wind was blowing from them towards us; they were unaware of us. I had my hand on the horn, when Fiesole clutched me. “Don’t. They’ve nothing in the world but this moment. God knows what lies before them!” We followed them at a distance. The symbolism of their silent figures awed us: overhead, the soundless battle of high-flying clouds; beneath, the gray vacancy with springtime stirring; around, the dun, unheeding earth; through the bareness the white road sweeping on unhurrying toward the land of sunsets; traveling along it a man and woman, for the time forgetful of their poverty, the focus-point of responsive passion. They had nothing but this moment. “And what have we?” I questioned. She crouched beside me; her soft arm stole about my neck. “Dearest, forgive me,” she murmured. Her eyes were blinded; my lips against her cheek were salt. She clung to me desperately, as though a hand pressed on her shoulder to jerk her from me--Vi’s hand. Where a rutted lane sloped down to a wooded hollow, the lovers turned. Among pollarded trees we lost them. They would never know that we had watched them. So they vanished out of our lives, walking hand-in-hand toward child-bearing and the inevitable separation of death that lurked for them at some hidden cross-road. We, equally unknowing, to what place of parting were we faring? I tilted up her face. “I’ve been a selfish fool. I’ll never speak another word about marriage or anything that will pain you. Oh, Fiesole, if you could only love me--love me as I love you--as though there was nothing else left!” She took my hands in her small ones, pressing them to her breast, quoting in a low sing-song, “Laugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span. Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.” “I like that--‘the old proud pageant of man.’ I wonder where you got it. But is there to be nothing deeper between us than laughter?” “If we do the laughing,” she said, “life’s ready to do the rest. But you’re a puritan at heart: you suspect that gladness is somehow unholy. Don’t you know, Mr. Bunyan, that laughter is the language they speak in heaven?”