promised to be an
exciting encounter, challenged his sister. Ruth accepted, and the pair
were off down a long, inviting slope none too smooth, with a stiff
stubble, but not the less attractive for that.

Richard and Roberta were left standing at the top of the hill near the
place where the fire was smouldering into dulness. Before them stretched
the valley, brown and yellow and dark green in the November sunlight,
with a gray-blue river winding its still length along. In the far
distance a blue-and-purple haze enveloped the hills; above all stretched
a sky upon whose fairness wisps of clouds were beginning to show here
and there, while in the south the outlines of a rising bank of gray gave
warning that those who gazed might look their fill to-day--to-morrow
there would be neither sunlight nor purple haze. The two looked in
silence for a minute, not at the boy and girl shouting below, but at the
beauty in the peaceful landscape.

"An Indian-summer day," said Roberta gravely, as if her mood had changed
with the moment, "is like the last look at something one is not sure one
shall ever see again."

At the words Richard's gaze shifted from the hill to the face of the
girl beside him. The sunshine was full upon the rich bloom of her cheek,
upon the exquisite line of her dark eyebrow. What was the beauty of an
Indian-summer landscape compared with the beauty of budding summer in
that face? But he answered her in the same quiet way in which she had
spoken: "Yes, it's hard to have faith that winter can sweep over all
this and not blot it out forever. But it won't."

"No, it won't. And after all I like the storms. I should like to stand
just here, some day when Nature was simply raging, and watch. I wish I
could build a stout little cabin right on this spot and come up here and
spend the worst night of the winter in it. I'd love it."

"I believe you would. But not alone? You'd want company?"

"I don't think I'd even mind being alone--if I had a good fire for
company--and a dog. I should be glad of a dog," she owned.

"But not one good comrade, one who liked the same sort of thing?"

"So few people really do. It would have to be somebody who wouldn't talk
when I wanted to listen to the wind, or wouldn't mind my not
talking--and yet who wouldn't mind my talking either, if I took a sudden
notion." She began to laugh at her own fancy, with the low, rich note
which delighted his ear afresh every time he heard it. "Comrades w