lves side by side and silent. The girl contemplated the distant
purple hills as if Hawker were not at her side and silent. Hawker
frowned at the roadway. Stanley, the setter, scouted the fields in a
genial gallop.

At last the girl turned to him. "Seems to me," she said, "seems to me
you are dreadfully quiet this afternoon."

"I am thinking about my wretched field of stubble," he answered, still
frowning.

Her parasol swung about until the girl was looking up at his inscrutable
profile. "Is it, then, so important that you haven't time to talk to
me?" she asked with an air of what might have been timidity.

A smile swept the scowl from his face. "No, indeed," he said, instantly;
"nothing is so important as that."

She seemed aggrieved then. "Hum--you didn't look so," she told him.

"Well, I didn't mean to look any other way," he said contritely. "You
know what a bear I am sometimes. Hollanden says it is a fixed scowl from
trying to see uproarious pinks, yellows, and blues."

A little brook, a brawling, ruffianly little brook, swaggered from side
to side down the glade, swirling in white leaps over the great dark
rocks and shouting challenge to the hillsides. Hollanden and the
Worcester girls had halted in a place of ferns and wet moss. Their
voices could be heard quarrelling above the clamour of the stream.
Stanley, the setter, had sousled himself in a pool and then gone and
rolled in the dust of the road. He blissfully lolled there, with his
coat now resembling an old door mat.

"Don't you think Jem is a wonderfully good fellow?" said the girl to the
painter.

"Why, yes, of course," said Hawker.

"Well, he is," she retorted, suddenly defensive.

"Of course," he repeated loudly.

She said, "Well, I don't think you like him as well as I like him."

"Certainly not," said Hawker.

"You don't?" She looked at him in a kind of astonishment.

"Certainly not," said Hawker again, and very irritably. "How in the wide
world do you expect me to like him as well as you like him?"

"I don't mean as well," she explained.

"Oh!" said Hawker.

"But I mean you don't like him the way I do at all--the way I expected
you to like him. I thought men of a certain pattern always fancied their
kind of men wherever they met them, don't you know? And I was so sure
you and Jem would be friends."

"Oh!" cried Hawker. Presently he added, "But he isn't my kind of a man
at all."

"He is. Jem is one of the best fellows in the wo