“Yes, but I am sure there was something else. Now tell me, was there not?”
“Why, how strangely you talk!” he replied, searching her face for an explanation. “Of course there wasn't; why should there be?”
She leaned back, apparently still in doubt as to his assertion, while her countenance grew even more grave than before. Henley was puzzled, and while Dorothy had not ceased to charm him, he was conscious of a very slight uneasiness in her presence. This, however, wore off a little later when they went together for a stroll in the forest. The girl's extreme delicacy of appearance, her abstracted, melancholy manner, and sincerity of expression, both attracted and perplexed Paul, and kept him constantly at work endeavoring to solve her character and form some conception of the mystery of her life. He had not yet had even the courage to ask her if Ah Ben were her father, dreading to expose himself as an impostor and be ordered from the place, which, despite his discovery of the previous night, he could only regard as an unmitigated hardship in the present state of his feelings; and so he had let the hours slip by, constantly hoping that something would occur to explain the whole situation to him. And yet nothing had occurred, and now upon the third day he was as grossly ignorant of the causes which had produced his strange environment as at the moment of his arrival.
“One thing I do not understand,” Paul observed, as they wandered over the vari-colored leaves, side by side; “it is why you should be so anxious to leave this ideal spot.”
“Have I not told you that it is because I am out of my element; because I am avoided; because I have not a friend far nor near! Oh, Paul, you do not know what it is to be alone in the world!”
“And do you believe that a simple change of locality would alter all this?” he asked.
She paused for a moment before answering, and then, looking down upon the ground, said as if with some effort:
“No, not that alone.”
“What then, Dorothy?” he asked with solicitude.
“I have already told you,” she replied without looking up. “Oh, Paul, what a short memory you must have!”