ion flashed into their eyes, they did not speak, looking at each
other long and seriously.

Finally, with a nymph-like stir of all her slender body, Lydia roused
herself. "Well, I can speak--can you?" she asked whimsically. "Don't you
remember me?"

The man drew a long breath and took off his cap, showing close-cropped
auburn hair gleaming, like his beard, red in the sun. "You took my
breath away!" he exclaimed.

"What was the matter with me?" asked Lydia, prettily confident of a
compliment to follow.

It came in so much less direct a form than she had expected that before
she recognized it she had returned it with naive impulsiveness.

"I didn't think you could be real," said the man, "you looked so exactly
the way this glorious morning made me feel."

"Why, that's just how you looked to me!" she cried, and flushed at the
significance of her words.

Before her confusion the other turned away his quiet gray eyes, and said
lightly, "Well, that's because we are the only people in all the world
with sense enough to get up so early on a morning like this. I've been
out tramping since dawn."

Lydia explained herself also. "I just couldn't sleep, it seemed so
lovely. It's my first morning home, you know."

"Is it?" responded the man, with a vagueness he made no effort to
conceal.

It came over Lydia with a shock that he did not know she had been away.
She felt hurt. It seemed ungracious for anyone in Endbury not to have
missed her, not to share in the joyful excitement of her final return.
"I've been in Europe for a year," she told him, with a dignity that was
a reproach.

"Oh, yes, yes; I remember now hearing Dr. Melton speak of it," he
answered, with no shade of apology for his forgetfulness. He looked at
her speculatively, as if wondering what note to strike for the
continuation of their talk. Apparently he decided on the note of
lightness. "Well, you're the most important person there is for me
to-day," he told her unexpectedly.

Lydia arched her dark eyebrows inquiringly. She was always sensitively
responsive, and now had forgotten, like a sweet-tempered child, her
momentary pique.

He smiled suddenly, moved, as people often were, to an apparently
irrelevant tenderness for her. His voice softened into a playfulness
like that of a person speaking to an imaginative little girl. "Why,
didn't you learn in school that all wise old nations have the belief
that the first person you meet after you go out in the