t him to the edge of the beach. He rose in front of old
Abraham.

A painter should have seen them together--the time-dried body of the old
man and the exuberant youth of the master. He looked on the servant with
a stern kindness.

"What are you doing here without a covering for your head while the sun
is hot? Did they let you come of their own accord, Abraham?"

"I slipped away," chuckled Abraham. "Isaac was in the patio, but I went
by him like a hawk-shadow. Then I ran among the trees. Hat? Well, no
more have you a hat, David."

The master frowned, but his displeasure passed quickly and he led the
way to the lowest terrace. They sat on the soft thick grass, with their
feet in the hot sand of the beach, and as the wind stirred the tree
above them a mottling of shadow moved across them.

"You have come to speak privately with me," said David. "What is it?"

But Abraham embraced his skinny knees and smiled at the lake, his jaw
falling.

"It's not what it was," he said, and wagged his head. "It's a sad lake
compared to what it was."

David controlled his impatience.

"Tell me how it is changed."

"The color," said the old man. "Why, once, with a gallon of that blue
you could have painted the whole sky." He shaded his face to look up,
but so doing his glance ventured through the branches and close to the
white-hot circle of the sun. His head dropped and he leaned on one arm.

"Look at the green of the grass," suggested David. "It will rest your
eyes."

"Do you think my eyes are weak? No, I dropped my head to think how the
world has fallen off in the last fifty years. It was all different in
the days of John. But that was before you came to the valley."

"The sky was not the same?" queried the master.

"And men, also," said Abraham instantly. "Ho, yes! John was a man; you
will not see his like in these days."

David flushed, but he held back his first answer. "Perhaps."

"There is no 'perhaps.'"

Abraham spoke with a decision that brought his jaw close up under his
nose.

"He is my master," insisted Abraham, and, smiling suddenly, he
whispered: "Mah ol' Marse Johnnie Cracken!"

"What's that?" called David.

Abraham stared at him with unseeing eyes. A mist of years drifted
between them, and now the old man came slowly out of the past and found
himself seated on the lawn in a lonely valley with great, naked
mountains piled around it.

"What did you say?" repeated David.

Abraham hastily changed th