his delight at her coming. His first
anxious look at her face had shown him the cordial friendliness of the
preceding day. She was amused by him, he could see that, and did not
resent it; but she was kind, and in his joy at this he babbled, at
first, with little coherence.

"I rode right over here to make sure I would see you," he began, "and
then if you rode down the valley, or up, I was going to loaf along and
find you by accident, and pretend I was hunting a colt. I was going to
be afraid the mountain lions had got it." He laughed immoderately at
this joke. "And while I waited for you I kept trying to think how fine
it would have sounded last night if you had said, 'I think I shall go
over and look at your place again to-morrow.' I couldn't make your voice
sound true, though. It's a good thing we needn't try to paint voices."

They were riding together over the first stretch of meadow. It seemed to
have been agreed without words that they should ride to the lake cabin.

"To paint voices?" she queried.

"Voices, yes; how could yours be painted? It couldn't. You'll see that.
I thought of a jumble of things--wine and velvet, for instance; some
kind of rich, golden wine and purple velvet, and then, warm flickers of
light in a darkened room, and a big bronze bell struck with something
soft that would muffle it and yet make everything about it tremble. You
see, don't you?" he concluded with a questioning look of deep
seriousness.

His own voice was low and eager, with its undernote of wistfulness.
Already he had renewed upon her that companionable charm which she had
felt the day before, a charm compounded of half-shy directness, of
flashes of self-forgetfulness, of quick-trusting comradeship. She
rejected a cant phrase of humorous disclaimer that habit brought to her
lips. It would puzzle or affront his forthrightness.

"Very well, we'll agree that my voice can't be painted," she said at
last. "So let us talk of you."

"I guess I should like that pretty well," he answered after a moment's
pondering. "I don't believe I've ever talked much; but now I feel as if
I could tire you out, talking as we did yesterday. Queer, wasn't it?"

He fell silent, however, when the trail narrowed to climb the long
ridge, as if the acknowledgment of his desire to speak had somehow
quenched it. She fell in ahead, half turning in her saddle to address
him from time to time, but he would talk only about things of the
moment. In a marsh