set here, and look at it."

He took his seat on one of the iron benches painted green, and
decorated with castings of grapes and vine leaves. She sat down beside
him and gazed out over the placid water, on which the crimson clouds
cast a mellow glory. The sky seemed like another sea, stretching off
into infinite distance, and strewn with continents of fiery splendor.
Maud looked straight forward to the clear horizon line, marking the
flight of ships whose white sails were dark against the warm brightness
of the illumined water. But no woman ever looked so straight before her
as not to observe the man beside her, and she knew, without moving her
eyes from the spectacle of the sunset, that Sam was gazing fixedly at
her, with pain and trouble in his face. At last, he said, in a timid,
choking voice,

"Mattie!"

She did not turn her face, but answered:

"If it ain't too much trouble, I'd like to have you call me Miss when
we're alone. You'll be forgetting yourself, and calling me Mattie
before other people, before you know it."

"Hold on," he burst out. "Don't talk to me that way to-night--I can't
stand it."

She glanced at him in surprise. His face was pale and disordered; he
was twisting his fingers as if he would break them.

"Your temper seems to be on the move, Mr. Sleeny. We'd better go home,"
she said quietly, drawing her shawl about her.

"Don't go till I tell you something," he stammered hastily.

"I have no curiosity to hear what you have to say," she said, rising
from her seat.

"It ain't what you think--it ain't about me!"

Her curiosity awoke, and she sat down again. Sleeny sat twisting his
fingers, growing pale and red by turns. At last, in a tremulous voice,
he said:

"_I_ was there to-day."

She stared at him an instant and said:

"Where?"

"Oh, I was there, and I seen you. I was at work at the end of the
greenhouse there by the gate when you come out of the rose-house. I was
watchin' for you. I was on the lawn talkin' with the gardener when you
went in the house. About an hour afterward I seen you comin' down the
garden with him to the rose-house. If you had stayed there a minute
more, I would ha' went in there. But out you come with your hands full
o' roses, and him and you come to the gate. I stopped workin' and kep'
still behind them pear trees, and I heard everything."

He uttered each word slowly, like a judge delivering sentence. His face
had grown very red and hot, and as he fi