is pace until he was up with the coach, he spoke to the negro
upon the box. "Tyre, drive on to that big pine, and wait there for your
mistress and me. Sidon,"--to the footman,--"get down and take my horse. If
your master wakes, tell him that Mistress Evelyn tired of the coach, and
that I am picking her a nosegay."

Tyre and Sidon, Haward's steed, the four black coach horses, the
vermilion-and-cream coach, and the slumbering Colonel, all made a progress
of an hundred yards to the pine-tree, where the cortege came to a halt.
Mistress Evelyn looked up from the flower-gathering to find the road bare
before her, and Haward, sitting upon a log, watching her with something
between a smile and a frown.

"You think that I, also, weigh true love by the weight of the purse," he
said. "I do not care overmuch for your gold, Evelyn."

She did not answer at once, but stood with her head slightly bent,
fingering the waxen flowers with a delicate, lingering touch. Now that
there was no longer the noise of the wheels and the horses' hoofs, the
forest stillness, which is composed of sound, made itself felt. The call
of birds, the whir of insects, the murmur of the wind in the treetops,
low, grave, incessant, and eternal as the sound of the sea, joined
themselves to the slow waves of fragrance, the stretch of road whereon
nothing moved, the sunlight lying on the earth, and made a spacious quiet.

"I think that there is nothing for which you care overmuch," she said at
last. "Not for gold or the lack of it, not for friends or for enemies, not
even for yourself."

"I have known you for many years," he answered. "I have watched you grow
from a child into a gracious and beautiful woman. Do you not think that I
care for you, Evelyn?"

Near where he sat so many violets were blooming that they made a purple
carpet for the ground. Going over to them, she knelt and began to pluck
them. "If any danger threatened me," she began, in her clear, low voice,
"I believe that you would step between me and it, though at the peril of
your life. I believe that you take some pleasure in what you are pleased
to style my beauty, some pride in a mind that you have largely formed. If
I died early, it would grieve you for a little while. I call you my
friend."

"I would be called your lover," he said.

She laid her fan upon the ground, heaped it with violets, and turned again
to her reaping. "How might that be," she asked, "when you do not love me?
I knew t