f the stream;
sometimes they were lighted by tiny flames of gold that sparkled in
the brown depths as the sunshine sparkled in the shadows. They were
deep as his love and bright as his hope.

Suddenly he realized that she had asked him a question.

"It's never a word I've heard of what ye are saying!" he exclaimed
contritely. "My mind was on your eyes, and the brown of them. Do they
keep changing color like that all the time?"

Ruth, thus earnestly appealed to, blushed furiously.

"I was talking about the river," she said quickly. "It's jolly under
here, isn't it? So cool and green! I was awfully cross when I
came."

"You cross?"

She nodded her head. "And ungrateful, and perverse, and queer, and
totally unlike my father's family." She counted off her shortcomings
on her fingers, and raised her brows in comical imitation of her aunt.

"A left-hand blessing on the one that said so!" cried Sandy, with such
ardor that she fled to another subject.

"I saw Martha Meech yesterday. She was talking about you. She was very
weak, and could speak only in a whisper, but she seemed happy."

"It's like her soul was in Heaven already," said Sandy.

"I took her a little picture," went on Ruth; "she loves them so. It
was a copy of one of Turner's."

"Turner?" repeated Sandy. "Joseph Mallord William Turner, born in
London, 1775. Member of the Royal Academy. Died in 1851."

She looked so amazed at this burst of information that he laughed.

"It's out of the catalogue. I learned what it said about the ones I
liked best years ago."

"Where?"

"At the Olympian Exposition."

"I was there," said Ruth; "it was the summer we came home from Europe.
Perhaps that was where I saw you. I know I saw you somewhere before
you came here."

"Perhaps," said Sandy, skipping a bit of bark across the water.

A band of yellow butterflies on wide wings circled about them, and
one, mistaking Ruth's rosy wet fingers for a flower, settled there for
a long rest.

"Look!" she whispered; "see how long it stays!"

"It's not meself would be blaming it for forgetting to go away," said
Sandy.

They both laughed, then Ruth leaned over the boat's side and pretended
to be absorbed in her reflection in the water. Sandy had not learned
that unveiled glances are improper, and if his lips refrained from
echoing the vireo's song, his eyes were less discreet.

"You've got a dimple in your elbow!" he cried, with the air of one
discovering a continent.