deem her presence at
table an empty show.

"I ain't a-goin' in," she continued. "Ye kin go," she added, with a
hasty afterthought. "Thar's a cheer sot ter the table fur you-uns. I'm
goin' ter bide hyar. They 'll git done arter a while."

She sat languidly down on a step of a stile that went over the fence
at a considerable distance from the house, and Selwyn, protesting that
he wanted no dinner, established himself on the protruding roots of a
great beech-tree that, like gigantic, knuckled, gnarled fingers,
visibly took a great grasp of the earth before sinking their tips far
out of sight beneath. The shade was dense; the sound of water
trickling into the rude horse-trough on the opposite side of the path
that was to be a road was delicious in its cool suggestion, for the
landscape, far, far to see, blazed as with the refulgence of a summer
sun. The odor of the apple orchard, heavily fruited, was mellow on the
air, and the red-freighted boughs of an old winesap bent above the
girl's head as she sat with her elbow on her knee and her chin in her
hand. She gazed dreamily away at those vividly blue ranges, whither
one might fancy summer had fled, so little affinity had their aspect
with the network of intermediate brown valleys, and nearer garnet
slopes, and the red and yellow oak boughs close at hand, hanging above
the precipice and limiting the outlook.

"Yes," he said, after a moment's cogitation, while he absently turned
a cluster of beech-nuts in his hands, "I'll try it, for keeps, you may
bet,--if you were a betting character. There's lots of good things
going in these mountains; that is, if a fellow had the money to get
'em out."

He looked up a trifle drearily from under the brim of his straw hat at
the smiling summertide of those blue mountains yonder. Oh, fair and
feigning prospect, what wide and alluring perspectives! He drew a long
sigh. Is it better to know so surely that winter is a-coming?

"An' the sense, too," remarked Narcissa, her eyes still dreamily
dwelling on the distance.

He roused himself. The unconsciously flattering inference was too
slight not to be lawfully appropriated.

"Yes, the sense and the enterprise. Now, these mountaineers,"--he
spoke as if she had no part among them, forgetting it, indeed, for the
moment,--"they let marble and silver and iron, and gold too, all sorts
of natural wealth, millions and millions of the finest hard-wood
timber, lie here undeveloped, without making