Truth--and especially for social news--to all the _Votaress's_
old coterie; Hugh, the pairs of Milliken's Bend, Vicksburg, and
Carthage, the boat's family, Phyllis, Madame Hayle, even old Joy--with
madame for amanuensis--and Ramsey herself. She and Hugh, had followed
every step in each other's course, upheld by a simplicity of faith in
friendship, love, and truth, which hardly needed to ask the one question
abundantly answered by this steadfastness of eye.

Now she looked away to the moon's path on the river, and the question of
change came back from her: "Have you?"

"Only to grow."

"You have grown," she said, "every way."

"And you," he replied, "every beautiful way. I have just said so to your
father."

Her response came instantly: "How did that happen?"

"We made it happen."

She looked at him again. "We," of course, meant "I." Truly she had grown
every beautiful way, but it was yet as wonderful as ever to stand,
saying what she had said, hearing what she was hearing, eye to eye, open
soul to open soul, with one who could make words--words at any
rate--happen between himself and Gideon Hayle. She looked this time not
alone into his eyes but on all his unhandsome countenance, and in a
surviving upflare of her younger days' extravagance thought whether,
among all time's heroes of the world's waters, there had ever been one
too great for Hugh Courteney's face. So looking she thrilled with the
belief that there was nothing such men had ever done which this one
might not some day, the right day, equal or surpass.

Again she looked away and as she looked the hovering Californian
murmured to his new-found confidant:

"You can't see the glory of her in this light nohow, unless you'd seen
her already in the full blaze of the cabin, or of broad day, with the
light in that red hair. If you had you wouldn't need even the moonlight
now. You'd only need to know she was there and you'd see her without
looking. I seen her in her first long dress, jest a-learning to fly and
some folks showing no more poetic vision than to call her 'almost
plain.' I saw the loveliness a-coming, like daybreak in the mountains.
And _he_ saw it. I saw he saw it. And now? I tell you, sir, her brow is
like the snowdrift, her throat is like the swan, and her face it is the
fairest--I never seen Annie Laurie, but if she's better looking or
sweeter behaving--I'd rather not. Anyhow they're enough alike to be
sisters. I've writ a poem on this one.