exploring all the afternoon."

They crossed the meadow to the barn, Jane explaining that the former
owner of the Hemlocks had lived for years in Europe, and left house and
land to run into their present overgrown decay. "Farmer and gardeners
worry about new fences and repairs, but I will not have even the dead
leaves cleared from the paths. I remember you said once you liked to
hear them crisp under your feet," sliding her own feet among them.

There was nothing in the idle, purposeless afternoon which any practical
man or woman would have thought worthy of an hour's remembrance; yet it
stood out for ever after, above all of Bruce Neckart's life, as some
fair table-land lifted from the fogs near to the sun.

They went into the house, examined patent hinges and locks, and
explored the vacant rooms and mysterious garrets filled with lumber. She
sat down by an old spinning-wheel, turning it and singing a scrap of
Gretchen's song, while the light from the dormer window touched her
white arched throat and yellow hair. They went to the stables, and the
old Scotch hostler brought out the horses and talked with Neckart of the
mysteries of flanks and strains of blood, while Jane looked on shyly,
standing with the dog in the wide door.

"Maybe I shall know them as well as I do you some day, Bruno," she said
gravely to him. "But I shall never like them as well. That wouldn't be
possible: they're strangers." The dog nuzzled his head into her hand and
marched steadily beside her. Then she took Neckart and Bruno over a
little hill to a spring-house, into which you went through a mossy door
across a sparkling little brook. She went inside and brought out a bowl
of yellow cream, all of them watching the kitchen windows guiltily as
she did it; and then they went on aimlessly across the stepping-stones
in the brook up through the field of young corn until they skirted the
brush hedge again, when Bruno left them in pursuit of ground-squirrels.
There was a bank running along the river-shore, topped with nodding
ferns and purple iron-weed, and brown with the soft, feathery tops of
the mouse-ear. The bank was on one side, the water on the other, swift,
dark, mobile, throwing back now a still belt of sunshine, now gloomy
woods, now the yellow shadows of low-driven clouds. They walked with the
river, not against it. The wind blew damp in their faces. Since Neckart
had talked so confidently of her father's improvement, Jane had been gay
and