He took her in his arms. “You feel about it the way I do,” he almost whispered. “I could not have hoped there’d be two of us to care so much.” Presently, while they remained without speaking by the pool, came a little wild animal swimming round the rock from above. It had not seen them, nor suspected their presence. They held themselves still, watching its alert head cross through the waves quickly and come down through the pool, and so swim to the other side. There it came out on a small stretch of sand, turned its gray head and its pointed black nose this way and that, never seeing them, and then rolled upon its back in the warm dry sand. After a minute of rolling, it got on its feet again, shook its fur, and trotted away. Then the bridegroom husband opened his shy heart deep down. “I am like that fellow,” he said dreamily. “I have often done the same.” And stretching slowly his arms and legs, he lay full length upon his back, letting his head rest upon her. “If I could talk his animal language, I could talk to him,” he pursued. “And he would say to me: ‘Come and roll on the sands. Where’s the use of fretting? What’s the gain in being a man? Come roll on the sands with me.’ That’s what he would say.” The Virginian paused. “But,” he continued, “the trouble is, I am responsible. If that could only be forgot forever by you and me!” Again he paused and went on, always dreamily. “Often when I have camped here, it has made me want to become the ground, become the water, become the trees, mix with the whole thing. Not know myself from it. Never unmix again. Why is that?” he demanded, looking at her. “What is it? You don’t know, nor I don’t. I wonder would everybody feel that way here?” “I think not everybody,” she answered. “No; none except the ones who understand things they can’t put words to. But you did!” He put up a hand and touched her softly. “You understood about this place. And that’s what makes it--makes you and me as we are now--better than my dreams. And my dreams were pretty good.” He sighed with supreme quiet and happiness, and seemed to stretch his length closer to the earth. And so he lay, and talked to her as he had never talked to any one, not even to himself. Thus she learned secrets of his heart new to her: his visits here, what they were to him, and why he had chosen it for their bridal camp. “What I did not know at all,” he said, “was the way a man can be pining for--for this--and never guess what is the matter with him.”