On the bridge in the gathering dusk they stood for some time without speaking, looking down at the river. Once or twice a passer-by glanced at the two figures leaning there on the hand-rail, and wondered at the foolishness of people who would stand in the cold and look at a river full of ice; but David and Elizabeth did not see the passing world. The hurrying water ran in a turbulent, foam-streaked flood; great sheets of ice, rocking and grinding against one another, made a continuous soft crash of sound. Sometimes one of them would strike the wooden casing of a pier, and then the whole bridge jarred and quivered, and the cake of ice, breaking and splintering, would heap itself on a long white spit that pushed up-stream through the rushing current. The river was yellow with mud torn up by a freshet back among the hills, but the last rays of the sun,--a disk of copper sinking into the brown haze behind the hills,--caught on the broken edges of the icy snow, and made a sudden white glitter almost from shore to shore. "Elizabeth," David said, "I want to tell you something. I stood right here, and looked at a raft coming down the river, the evening that Blair told me that you and he--" "Don't!" she said, shivering. "I won't," he told her tenderly; "you were only a child; it didn't mean anything. Don't you suppose I understand? But I wanted you to know that it was then, nearly eight years ago, when I was just a boy, that I realized that _I_--" he paused. She looked at him silently; her lip quivered and she nodded. "And I have never changed since," he said. "I stood just here, leaning on this railing, and I was so wretched!" he laughed under his breath; "I didn't know what was the matter with me! I was only a cub, you know. But"--he spoke very softly--"all of a sudden I knew. Elizabeth, a woman on the raft looked up at me. There was a little baby. . . . Dear, it was then that I knew I loved you." At those elemental words her heart came up into her throat. She could not speak, but suddenly she stooped and kissed the battered hand-rail where he said his hands had rested. David, horrified, glancing right and left in the dusk and seeing no one, put a swift arm about her in which to whisper a single word. Then, very softly, he kissed her cheek. For a moment she seemed to ebb away from him; then, abruptly, like, the soft surge of a returning wave, she sank against his breast and her lips demanded his. . . .