bbit, had became a foot-sore
and tedious business. He had reached the edge of the forest, and through
the wider-spaced trees, the bleak sunlit plateau of his house was
beginning to open out, when he stopped instantly. I know not what Jeff
had been thinking of, as he trudged along, but here, all at once, he was
thrilled and possessed with the odor of some faint, foreign perfume. He
flushed a little at first, and then turned pale. Now the woods were as
full of as delicate, as subtle, as grateful, and, I wot, far healthier
and purer odors than this; but this represented to Jeff the physical
contiguity of Miss Mayfield, who had the knack--peculiar to some of her
sex--of selecting a perfume that ideally identified her. Jeff looked
around cautiously; at the foot of a tree hard by lay one of her wraps,
still redolent of her. Jeff put down the bag which, in lieu of a market
basket, he was carrying on his shoulder, and with a blushing face hid it
behind a tree. It contained her dinner!

He took a few steps forwards with an assumption of ease and
unconsciousness. Then he stopped, for not a hundred yards distant
sat--Miss Mayfield on a mossy boulder, her cloak hanging from her
shoulders, her hands clasped round her crossed knees, and one little
foot out--an exasperating combination of Evangeline and little Red
Riding Hood in everything, I fear, but credulousness and self-devotion.
She looked up as he walked towards her (non constat that the little
witch had not already seen him half a mile away!) and smiled sweetly
as she looked at him. So sweetly, indeed, that poor Jeff felt like the
hulking wolf of the old world fable, and hesitated--as that wolf did
not. The California faunae have possibly depreciated.

"Come here!" she cried, in a small head voice, not unlike a bird's
twitter.

Jeff lumbered on clumsily. His high boots had become suddenly very
heavy.

"I'm so glad to see you. I've just tired poor mother out--I'm always
tiring people out--and she's gone back to the house to write letters.
Sit down, Mr. Jeff, do, please!"

Jeff, feeling uncomfortably large in Miss Mayfield's presence, painfully
seated himself on the edge of a very low stone, which had the effect
of bringing his knees up on a level with his chin, and affected an ease
glaringly simulated.

"Or lie down, there, Mr. Jeff--it is so comfortable."

Jeff, with a dreadful conviction that he was crashing down like a
falling pine-tree, managed at last to acquire a