rehead.
He was not positively handsome, but from head to foot he expressed a
fresh, sound quality of manhood.

Another question flashed across Miss Bartram's mind: Is life long enough
to transform this clay into marble? Here is a man in form, and with
all the dignity of the perfect masculine nature: shall the broad, free
intelligence, the grace and sweetness, the taste and refinement, which
the best culture gives, never be his also? If not, woman must be content
with faulty representations of her ideal.

So musing, she walked on to the farm-house. Leonard had picked up one
of the blossoms she had let fall, and appeared to be curiously examining
it. If he had apologized for his want of grammar, or promised to reform
it, her interest in him might have diminished; but his silence, his
simple, natural obedience to some powerful inner force, whatever it
was, helped to strengthen that phantom of him in her mind, which was now
beginning to be a serious trouble.

Once again, the day before she left the Rambo farmhouse to return to the
city, she came upon him, alone. She had wandered off to the Brandywine,
to gather ferns at a rocky point where some choice varieties were to
be found. There were a few charming clumps, half-way up a slaty cliff,
which it did not seem possible to scale, and she was standing at the
base, looking up in vain longing, when a voice, almost at her ear, said:

"Which ones do you want?"

Afterwards, she wondered that she did not start at the voice. Leonard
had come up the road from one of the lower fields: he wore neither
coat nor waistcoat, and his shirt, open at the throat, showed the firm,
beautiful white of the flesh below the strong tan of his neck. Miss
Bartram noticed the sinewy strength and elasticity of his form, yet when
she looked again at the ferns, she shook her head, and answered:

"None, since I cannot have them."

Without saying a word, he took off his shoes, and commenced climbing the
nearly perpendicular face of the cliff. He had done it before, many a
time; but Miss Bartram, although she was familiar with such exploits
from the pages of many novels, had never seen the reality, and it quite
took away her breath.

When he descended with the ferns in his hand, she said: "It was a great
risk; I wish I had not wanted them."

"It was no risk for me," he answered.

"What can I send you in return?" she asked, as they walked forwards. "I
am going home to-morrow."

"Betty told me," L