“Why has she got to go? Why must she be lost? Why does she have to go and marry that damned Swede?”
In the great moon-drenched field beside the road, the cows were moving towards them slowly, grazing, pulling the fragrant meadow grass of night with sweet, cool wrenching, with rustling stir, and with whisking of dry tails.
The girl walked over to the wire fence, and one of the cows, after regarding her with its grave, gentle stare, moved slowly towards her, rattling the fence wires as it thrust its gentle, bending head across the fence and nuzzled her soft palm.
“She seems to know you,” said the youth.
“Yes,” the girl answered. “I know them all by name, they all know me. I gave them all their names: this one’s Brindle. Aren’t they lovely creatures?” she said quietly, as she stroked the cow. “Such—such—gentle pets,” she said, “with their kind looks and great, soft eyes. They all know me, and will come to me when I call their names.”
The other cows, indeed, were now standing still, faced toward her, looking at her with slow, gaunt and gentle heads. Now, slowly, they started to move toward her, making a cool, sweet rustling through night grasses as they came. The moonlight burst upon their short, curved horns, it burst upon the rich bright patches of their mottled hides, upon their stringy, dung-bespattered rumps, their soft eyes, and the slow, gentle wonder of their long, gaunt heads.
And it was all so wonderful—the sleeping woods, the moon-enchanted fields, the slow, light grazings of the moonlit cows, and all the fragrance of the night, the grass, the clover and the meadow spells, and the magic warmth and loveliness of the girl, and her sweet, low voice beside him in the moonlight—that it seemed to him that all his life had been a prelude and a preparation to this wonder. He did not know what he could say, it came swelling up in a wild flood of tenderness and passion, he felt that he must tell her somehow, and he had no words for saying it; he seized her hands and stammered:
“Look here—if I live to be a million years I’ll never—the way the river was tonight, the moon, and the way Joel met me and then finding you and your mother and your friends there in the moonlight—and the river down below—and now this walk with you—this road—the field—and all these cows there in the field—and you here—why, by God!” he cried thickly, incoherently, “you are the finest girl I ever saw in
