Is this not Eden? I swear
it is paradise enough for me. Tell me, why is it that in the glimpses
the sages give us of paradise they no more than lift the curtain--and
let it fall again?"

"Captain Meriwether Lewis is singularly gloomy this morning!"

"Not more than I have been always. How brief was my little hour! Yet
for that time I knew paradise--as I do now. We should part here,
madam, now, forever. Yon serpent spelled danger for both of us."

"For both of us?"

"No, forgive me! None the less, I could not help my thoughts--cannot
help them now. I ride here every morning. I saw your horse's
hoof-marks some two miles back. Do you suppose I did not know whose
they were?"

"And you followed me? Ah!"

"I suppose I did, and yet I did not. If I did I knew I was riding to
my fate."

She would have spoken--her lips half parted--but what she might have
said none heard.

He went on:

"I have ridden here since first I saw you turn this way one morning. I
guessed this might be your haunt at dawn. I have ridden here
often--and feared each time that I might meet you. Perhaps I came this
morning in the same way, not knowing that you were near, but hoping
that you might be. You see, madam, I speak the absolute truth with
you."

"You have never spoken aught else to any human soul. That I know."

"And yet you try to evade the truth? Why deceive your heart about it,
since I have not deceived my own? I have faced it out in my own heart,
and I have, I trust, come off the victor. At some cost!"

Her face was troubled. She looked aside as she replied in a voice low,
but firm:

"Any woman would be glad to hear such words from Captain Lewis, and I
am glad. But--the honest wife never lived who could listen to them
often."

"I know that," he said simply.

"No!" Her voice was very low now; her eyes soft and cast down as they
fell upon a ring under her glove. "We must not meet, Captain
Meriwether Lewis. At least, we must not meet thus alone in the woods.
It might cause talk. The administration has enemies enough, as you
know--and never was a woman who did not have enemies, no matter how
clean her life has been."

"Clean as the snow, yours! I have never asked you to be aught else,
and never will. I sought you once, when I rode from Virginia to New
York--when I first had my captain's pay, before Mr. Jefferson asked me
to join his family. Before that time I had too little to offer you;
but then, with my hopes and my ambitions,