is side, under the same tattered and
ill-scented Japanese goat-skin, he could not refuse to be glad, with all
his self-blame.

"I'm afraid it's rather a long drive-for you, Miss Shirley," he
ventured, with a glance at her face, which looked very little under her
hat. "The driver says it's five miles round through the marshes."

"Oh, I shall not mind," she said, courageously, if not cheerfully, and
he did not feel authorized further to recognize the fact that she was an
invalid, or at best a convalescent.

"These wintry tree-forms are fine, though," he found himself obliged
to conclude his apology, rather irrelevantly, as the wheels of the
rattling, and tilting carry all crunched the surface of the road in the
succession of jerks responding to the alternate walk and gallop of the
horse.

"Yes, they are," Miss Shirley answered, looking around with a certain
surprise, as if seeing them now for the first time. "So much variety of
color; and that burnished look that some of them have." The trees, far
and near, were giving their tones and lustres in the low December sun.

"Yes," he said, "it's decidedly more refined than the autumnal coloring
we brag of."

"It is," she approved, as with novel conviction. "The landscape is
really beautiful. So nice and flat," she added.

He took her intention, and he said, as he craned his neck out of the
carryall to include the nearer roadside stretches, with their low bushes
lifting into remoter trees, "It's restful in a way that neither the
mountains nor the sea, quite manage."

"Oh yes," she sighed, with a kind of weariness which explained itself in
what she added: "It's the kind of thing you'd like to have keep on and
on." She seemed to say that more to herself than to him, and his eyes
questioned her. She smiled slightly in explaining: "I suppose I find it
all the more beautiful because this is my first real look into the world
after six months indoors."

"Oh!" he said, and there was no doubt a prompting in his tone.

She smiled still. "Sick people are terribly, egotistical, and I suppose
it's my conceit of having been the centre of the universe so lately that
makes me mention it." And here she laughed a little at herself, showing
a charming little peculiarity in the catch of her upper lip on her
teeth. "But this is divine--this air and this sight." She put her head
out of her side of the carryall, and drank them in with her lungs and
eyes.

When she leaned back again on th