"What are you talking about, back there?" exclaimed his guide, turning sharply to call him to account.
"Did I speak aloud? I was--ah--only wondering where we are going to bring up?"
"Do I tire you? Perhaps you are not used to walking. Never mind; we shall soon reach the graveyard, and then you can sit upon the stone wall and rest."
"I think I can last to the graveyard," meekly said the young man, whose tramps in the Alps and Dolomites and Rockies had included of "broken records" not a few.
"Now, you are laughing at me," she said, suspiciously. "But you know I have never heard of you except as a lounger in clubs and a leader of _cotillons_."
They now reached an enclosure under a grove of maples, where, motioning him to sit upon a low wall tapestried with moss and fern and creepers, she perched upon the gnarled root of a tree, and, opening her book, prepared to become absorbed in it.
"Suppose you read aloud to me," he suggested, with cunning aforethought.
"This?" she said, doubtfully, surveying his verses. "Oh, no; I think not. You would hardly care for _this_. It is something quite out of your line, don't you see? The writer gives expression to a perfectly straightforward, yet eloquent, expression of a true man's true feeling, about a thing of every day. It is not only that the words are lovely and the sentiment is noble, but the measure ripples like a stream--Why, what is the matter with you? One would think you know the author."
"I am afraid, upon reflection, that I _do not_ know the author," he said, drawing back into his shell.
"If you did, I should get you to thank him for me for this," she resumed. "They say authors are always disappointing to meet, after one has idealized them through their writings. But _he_ would not be. No; I would trust him, through everything, to be a noble gentleman. Of course he is unworldly. I believe he lives in a remote Territory, and despises petty conventionalities of society, especially those in New York. And I think he never even heard of that dreadful 400 of yours."
Vance, smiling at her girlish nonsense, felt himself, nevertheless, lapped in the Elysium of her speech.
Then her mood changed to pathos, as she told him the story of "Cousin Josey's" single episode of love, ending in the mound beside them, where slept the old man's bride-betrothed of seventeen,--a ward of his mother,--who had died of a tragic accident, forty years agone.