onal train upon the platform, he saw her.

She was waving to him from a one-seated phaeton, come alone to meet
him--and she was the adorable, the perfect comrade. He thought
jubilantly as he strode along the platform: "She's wonderful. Love
her? Should say I do!"

While they drove under the elms, past white cottages and the village
green, while they were talking so lightly and properly that none of
the New England gossips could be wounded in the sense of propriety,
Carl was learning her anew. She was an outdoor girl now, in
low-collared blouse and white linen skirt. He rejoiced in her
modulating laugh; the contrast of blue eyes and dark brows under her
Panama hat; her full dark hair, with a lock sun-drenched; her bare
throat, boyishly brown, femininely smooth; the sweet, clean,
fine-textured girl flesh of the hollow of one shoulder faintly to be
seen in the shadow of her broad, drooping collar; one hand, with a
curious ring of rose quartz and steel points, excitedly pounding a
tattoo of greeting with the whip-handle; her spirited irreverences
regarding the people they passed; chatter which showed the world
transformed as through ruby glass--a Ruth radiant, understanding, his
comrade. She was all that he had believed during her absence and
doubted while he was coming to her. But he had no time to repent of
his doubt, now, so busily was he exulting to himself, slipping a hand
under her arm: "Love her? I--should--say--I--do!"

The carriage rolled out of town with the rhythmic creak of a country
buggy, climbed a hill range by means of the black, oily state road,
and turned upon a sandy side-road. A brook ran beside them. Sunny
fields alternated with woods leaf-floored, quiet, holy--miraculous
after the weary city. Below was a vista of downward-sloping fields,
divided by creeper-covered stone walls; then a sun-meshed valley set
with ponds like shining glass dishes on a green table-cloth; beyond
all, a long reach of hillsides covered with unbroken fleecy forest,
like green down....

"So much unspoiled country, and yet there's people herded in subways!"
complained Carl.

They drove along a level road, lined with wild raspberry-bushes and
full of a thin jade light from the shading maples. They gossiped of
the Patton Kerrs and the Berkshires; of the difference between the
professional English week-ender and the American, who still has
something of the naive provincial delight of "going visiting"; of New
York and the Dunle