ower, and ordered her
to analyze it. Would she blunder, or show herself dull and incompetent?
One thing was certain: no pretended zeal could deceive old
Katharine--she knew the reality too well.

But there was no pretense. Anne, honest as usual, analyzed the flower
with some mistakes, but with real interest; and the keen black eyes
recognized the genuine hue of the feeling, as far as it went. After that
initiation, every morning they drove to the woods, and Anne searched in
all directions, coming back loaded down with spoil. Every afternoon
there followed analyzing, pressing, drying, and labelling, for hours.

"Pray leave the foundations of our bridge intact," called Isabel Varce,
passing on horseback, accompanied by Ward Heathcote, and looking down at
Anne digging up something on the bank below, while at a little distance
Miss Vanhorn's coupe was waiting, with the old lady's hard face looking
out through the closed window.

Anne laughed, and turned her face, glowing with rose-color, upward to
look at them.

"Do you like that sort of thing?" said Isabel, pausing, having noted at
a glance that the young girl was attired in old clothes, and appeared in
every way at a disadvantage. She had no especial malice toward Anne in
this; she merely acted on general principles as applied to all of her
own sex. But even the most acute feminine minds make mistakes on one
subject, namely, they forget that to a man dress is not the woman. Anne,
in her faded gown, down on the muddy bank, with her hat off, her boots
begrimed, and her zeal for the root she was digging up, seemed to Ward
Heathcote a new and striking creature. The wind ruffled her thick brown
hair and blew it into little rings and curls about her face, her eyes,
unflinching in the brilliant sunshine, laughed back at them as they
looked over the railing; the lines of her shoulder and extended arms
were of noble beauty. To a woman's eyes a perfect sleeve is of the
highest importance; it did not occur to Isabel that through the ugly,
baggy, out-of-date sleeve down there on the bank, the wind, sturdily
blowing, was revealing an arm whose outline silk and lace could never
rival. Satisfied with her manoeuvre, she rode on: Anne certainly looked
what all women would have called "a fright."

Yet that very evening Heathcote approached, recalled himself to Miss
Vanhorn's short memory, and, after a few moments of conversation, sat
down beside Anne, who received him with the same fr