"I really do not see that I am called upon to say anything on the subject at all!" said the girl, rising and looking at him across the brook with indignant eyes and a hot glow on her cheek.
He did not appear to notice her annoyance.
"You are, because you know something about it, and most women don't: your testimony is worth something. How long have you been here,--a year? I wonder how it seems to a woman to live in a place like this a year! I hate it all, you know,--I've seen so much of it. But is there really any beauty here? I suppose beauty, and all that sort of thing, is partly within us, isn't it?--at least, that's what the goody little poems tell us."
"I think it is very beautiful here," said Miss Frances, softening, as he laid aside his strained manner, and spoke more quietly. "It is the kind of place a happy woman might be very happy in; but if she were sad--or--disappointed"--
"Well?" said Arnold, pulling at his mustache, and fixing a rather gloomy gaze upon her.
"She would die of it! I really do not think there would be any hope for her in a place like this."
"But if she were happy, as you say," persisted the young man, "don't you think her woman's adaptability and quick imagination would help her immensely? She wouldn't see what I, for instance, know to be ugly and coarse; her very ignorance of the world would help her."
There was a vague, pleading look in his eyes. "Arrange it to suit yourself," she said. "Only, I can assure you, if anything should happen to her, it will be the--the hunter's fault."
"All right," said he, rousing himself. "That hunter, if I know him, is a man who is used to taking risks! Where are you going?"
They were both silent, and as they listened, footsteps, with a tinkling accompaniment, crackled among the bushes below the cañon. Miss Newell turned towards the spring again. "I want one more drink before I go," she said.
Arnold followed her. "Let us drink to our return. Let this be our fountain of Trevi."
"Oh, no," said Miss Frances. "Don't you remember what your favorite Bryant says about bringing the 'faded fancies of an elder world' into these 'virgin solitudes'?"
"Faded fancies!" cried Arnold. "Do you call that a faded fancy? It is as fresh and graceful as youth itself, and as natural. I should have thought of it myself, if there had been no fountain of Trevi."