bulary of love? Or had we
determined by unexpressed consent, after enjoying the luxury of passion
that speaks, to try the deeper and finer rapture of passion that thinks?
I can hardly determine; I only know that a time came when, under some
strange influence, our lips were closed toward each other. We traveled
along, each of us absorbed in our own reverie. Was he thinking
exclusively of me--as I was thinking exclusively of him? Before the
journey's end I had my doubts; at a little later time I knew for certain
that his thoughts, wandering far away from his young wife, were all
turned inward on his own unhappy self.

For me the secret pleasure of filling my mind with him, while I felt him
by my side, was a luxury in itself.

I pictured in my thoughts our first meeting in the neighborhood of my
uncle's house.

Our famous north-country trout stream wound its flashing and foaming way
through a ravine in the rocky moorland. It was a windy, shadowy evening.
A heavily clouded sunset lay low and red in the west. A solitary angler
stood casting his fly at a turn in the stream where the backwater lay
still and deep under an overhanging bank. A girl (myself) standing on
the bank, invisible to the fisherman beneath, waited eagerly to see the
trout rise.

The moment came; the fish took the fly.

Sometimes on the little level strip of sand at the foot of the bank,
sometimes (when the stream turned again) in the shallower water rushing
over its rocky bed, the angler followed the captured trout, now letting
the line run out and now winding it in again, in the difficult and
delicate process of "playing" the fish. Along the bank I followed to
watch the contest of skill and cunning between the man and the trout.
I had lived long enough with my uncle Starkweather to catch some of his
enthusiasm for field sports, and to learn something, especially, of the
angler's art. Still following the stranger, with my eyes intently fixed
on every movement of his rod and line, and with not so much as a chance
fragment of my attention to spare for the rough path along which I was
walking, I stepped by chance on the loose overhanging earth at the edge
of the bank, and fell into the stream in an instant.

The distance was trifling, the water was shallow, the bed of the river
was (fortunately for me) of sand. Beyond the fright and the wetting I
had nothing to complain of. In a few moments I was out of the water and
up again, very much ashamed of myse