Page:Son of the wind.djvu/140

RV 128 "Yes—shake me up out of my stiffness. Wake me up. Show me—" he hesitated— "all of it!"

"Of what?"

"The odd hours—sunset, moonrise, whatever time out of the twenty-four you like the best."

Her eyes sparkled, and a smile curled the corners of her mouth.

"Well, which is it?" he asked, and felt an impulse to reach out and stroke her, she looked so sweet.

"The middle of the night!" she said it very softly, as though she feared the day might overhear her. Her eyes looked dreamy, but did not look away from him. They included him in the dream. Her hand plucked, one by one, the frail white grasses.

"I love to be out in it, it is like water, smooth and deep; like flood tide. It is so still you can think time has stopped for a moment." Her voice became a part of the silence. In the broad noon a sense of a shadow had fallen upon him. In the pause she seemed to have led him far, to the edge of his unasked question, to the edge of the wildest of possibilities.

"Will you take me out into the middle of the night, and drown me in it some time?" he asked. "Will you bring me out here?"

"Why here?"