slow
procession, a vision of faded colors and swarthy faces, jingle of spur
and mule bell mingling with salutations in sonorous Spanish.

As the day grew warmer, the doctor complained of the heat and went back
to the wagon. David and the young girl rode on together through the
green thickness of the wood. They had talked a little while the doctor
was there, and now, left to themselves, they suddenly began to talk a
good deal. In fact, Miss Gillespie revealed herself as a somewhat
garrulous and quite friendly person. David felt his awed admiration
settling into a much more comfortable feeling, still wholly admiring
but relieved of the cramping consciousness that he had entertained an
angel unawares. She was so natural and girlish that he began to
cherish hopes of addressing her as "Miss Susan," even let vaulting
ambition carry him to the point where he could think of some day
calling himself her friend.

She was communicative, and he was still too dazzled by her to realize
that she was not above asking questions. In the course of a half hour
she knew all about him, and he, without the courage to be thus
flatteringly curious, knew the main points of her own history. Her
father had been a practicing physician in Rochester for the past
fifteen years. Before that he had lived in New York, where she had
been born twenty years ago. Her mother had been a Canadian, a French
woman from the Province of Quebec, whom her father had met there one
summer when he had gone to fish in Lake St. John. Her mother had been
very beautiful--David nodded at that, he had already decided it--and
had always spoken English with an accent. She, the daughter, when she
was little, spoke French before she did English; in fact, did not Mr.
Crystal notice there was still something a little queer about her _r_'s?

Mr. Crystal had noticed it, noticed it to the extent of thinking it
very pretty. The young lady dismissed the compliment as one who does
not hear, and went on with her narrative:

"After my mother's death my father left New York. He couldn't bear to
live there any more. He'd been so happy. So he moved away, though he
had a fine practice."

The listener gave forth a murmur of sympathetic understanding.
Devotion to a beautiful woman was matter of immediate appeal to him.
His respect for the doctor rose in proportion, especially when the
devotion was weighed in the balance against a fine practice. Looking
at the girl's profil